


The Mother We Share

by Tawabids



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dad Poe, F/M, Force-Sensitive Finn, I will love writing Old General Leia until the day I die, Kid Fic, Leia deserves better, Leia's A+ Parenting, Multi, Nanny Chewie, No Incest, Reincarnation AU, That's Not How The Force Works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-07 14:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6808966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a prompt on the kinkmeme: Finn and Rey are killed in battle and reborn to General Organa as twins. She soon finds it takes a village (or a Resistance) to raise a child. </p><p>But their unnatural origin and growing Force abilities inevitably put them in the path of Leia’s elder son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt here : tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/3961.html?thread=9364089#cmt9364089
> 
> This fic places Finn and Rey as romantic before their reincarnation and fraternal afterwards; there is no twincest. For the record I ship Finnrey, and I don’t interpret their TFA relationship as platonic or fraternal, I see it as canonically romantic. I just really like kid!fic and want to write them in every possible way.

The last thing Rey says to Finn is, “I’ll see you soon. Over.” 

The transmission crackles in the raging storm. He responds with a cursory, “Roger that,” not thinking that it will be the final time he hears her voice, and she hears his. 

He knows they’ve screwed up when he sees the lightsabers flashing, up on the wall of the First Order base. Kylo Ren was not supposed to be here. Rey should have sensed him before they ever broke atmosphere. But he’s here, and he’s got Rey cornered between him and a platoon of Stormtroopers, and it all happens so fast that Finn thinks perhaps it’s not real, it’s a vision from the Force. Because he can’t have seen Rey’s double-bladed lightsaber go dark as Kylo Ren cuts her down. He can’t have seen the shape of her crumple like a pillar of sand. He can’t have felt that terrible ache blossom in the Force. It must be a warning. It can’t be real.

There’s more soldiers closing in on them. He orders the rest of the team to get back to the ship. They’ve screwed up. This was a trap.

“Captain—“ their young, Bothan pilot shakes his head. “Where are you going?”

Finn says, “To buy you time. Get out. Get home!”

And then he runs, raising his rifle to his shoulder and looking for cover, still thinking that if he’s just fast enough, strong enough, if he can access that reservoir of Force strength that he put aside to become an officer under General Organa, somehow, somehow, somehow he’ll save her—

It takes three squadrons to stop him firing. The rest of the team get away. Finn dies crouched behind a low wall of earth, with his finger still on the trigger, lying in the mud, in the storm, alone.

 

\---[]---

 

Finn finds himself on a lakeside ringed by green, under a sky of blue and gold. There’s a strange sun sinking over the trees and stars just beginning to glow on the far horizon. Rey stands looking out at the sun, her hand shading her eyes. She waves to him. “There you are!”

He jogs towards her. She’s in a grey vest and trousers, her hair hanging loose, longer than it has been in years. Her smile outshines the sunset. “I’ve been looking for you for days,” she says.

“But I was just talking to you—” he starts to reply, but then he can’t remember where, or what they said to each other. He holds her tight, breathing in that long-familiar smell. 

They live on the lakeside for a long time; a lifetime, or no time. It’s hard to measure time. The sun is always setting, and there’s no hunger anymore. Just Rey, and him. They talk, but they don’t need to speak, because they’re in and out of each other’s minds as easy as sharing a breath between their lips. They make love over and over, like they did when she came back from training with Master Skywalker and she said she was going to remake the Jedi anew. And the sun never vanishes, and the stars never fill up the space above, but soon they both feel it: this world is shrinking. 

They can see the curve of the planet now, bending the trees away from each other, revealing more constellations in the sphere of the sky. The stars themselves seem closer, as close as the roof of a cathedral. Speech is getting more difficult, like struggling through mud. Their hands don’t seem as solid as before. 

“I think we’re going back,” Rey says. She sounds unhappy for the first time since he saw her on the lakeside. “Returning to the Force.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Finn holds her insubstantial face in hands that feel as thin as smoke. In the distance he can hear a creaking, the rumble of earthquakes, and the whisper of a high wind. 

“Luke says every living thing that ever was is together in the Force,” she presses her forehead to his and closes her eyes.

“We didn’t have enough time,” he counters. “We were supposed to do more.”

“I know,” she whispers, and grabs his hands over her cheeks. “So come with me.”

They walk into the lake hand in hand as the planet collapses into itself. 

 

\---[]---

 

They have been dead for mere moments. Far away, General Leia Organa feels her brother’s apprentice as her life flickers out, and then soon after goes dear Finn, who has never let her down, who has brought them so many defectors from the First Order in his years under her command. She does not say anything to those around her. For the first time in a very long time, she isn’t sure.

 

\---[]---

 

They have been dead for two weeks. Poe is helping the engineers test an X-Wing with a newly repaired left engine. It’s just a simple calibration lift-off; take her up, out of the hanger, loop round and land again. When he gets twenty feet up, the new engine gets twitchy under the throttle, and he tries to stabilise by adding a soft touch on the left reversers but he overdoes it and suddenly he’s lost the horizon and just manages to pull it back and kill the thrusters before he goes into a full spin. The ship has turned a full 180 and careens into the wall of the hanger. His instinct barely lines it up so he wrecks the paintwork and the new engine, but not himself or the cluster of cadets loitering by the stairs. 

Fire personnel sprint down from the barracks up the hill and the controllers order the handful of other ships waiting in the air to hold their positions. They can all hear Poe over the radio, “Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit!” 

Jessica Pava runs to the damaged X-Wing even though protocol says it should be emergency crew only. She’s never heard her commander lose his cool like that, not after dozens of minor crashes and near-misses. She sees him climb out of the cockpit and clumsily drop down onto the concrete. He tears his helmet off and hurls it aside, striding towards the open grass off the side of the runway as the fire crew hose down the ruined, smoking engine with foam.

“Poe!” Jess follows him, watching him stumble and lash out at nothing.

“Fuck. Shit. Fuck,” Poe crouches in the grass, digging his fingers into his hair. It scares Jess to see him like this. He’s Poe Dameron. He doesn’t get flustered. He doesn’t get scared.

“It’s okay,” she reaches him, kneels to slide one hand over his shoulder, under the edge of his flight vest. “The engine got too much juice, I saw it, the throttle wasn’t balanced. It wasn’t your fault.”

He shakes his head and she sees there are tears on his cheeks. He presses a hand over his mouth. 

“Poe,” she grips his shoulder. “You lost people. We all lose people in this war, it’s okay to feel like shit about it. Cry about it. Take some time.”

He sobs and shakes his head again, and she’s never heard his voice as shattered as it is now, “Not them. Not those two. I got in too deep, Jess, I got stupid. I thought they were Force Fucking Magic and they’d never die.”

As she tries to stroke his hair, an uncomfortable gesture from her perspective when made towards her senior colleague, he tears away from her. He gets up on shaking legs and walks away from the runway, his hands hanging by his side. Her brave, dashing commander, the one who picks them all up when they can’t go on. Maybe this is a turning point. Maybe it doesn’t get better from here. 

 

\---[]---

 

They have been dead for nine weeks.

Leia listens to the Force when it talks to her, but she rarely takes its advice to heart. So she’s been ignoring the nagging sensation that she’s not alone even though it has been growing stronger for almost two months. Finally, she goes to Major Kalonia. Not in the med bay, of course. She asks her for a drink in the General’s quarters. 

Once they’ve each got a glass of the best spirits this side of D’Qar in their hands and have been shooting the breeze for a while, Leia breaks it to her straight. “Doc, is there any way I could be pregnant?”

Kalonia considers her face for a moment, lips pursed, but she knows Leia’s sense of humour better than that after all these years. “You did a test?” she finally asks.

“Yeah, I did a test. Took one from your store room when you were out in the field yesterday. Still got the instincts of a spy, don’t you know,” she winks over her glass. All the wrinkles on her cheeks shift. 

Kalonia sighs. “General, I have good news and bad news. The good news is no, you and I both know that those days are well behind you. The bad news is that a high level of those hormones could, possibly, indicate a tumour—”

“No, no, no,” Leia raises her hand. 

“—I know, that can sound scarier than a code blue shield breach, but—”

“It’s not a tumour,” Leia’s voice is the voice of the General, and Kalonia falls silent. “Doc, I know it’s not a medical diagnosis, but the Force is telling me something I didn’t think was possible. I’m two months pregnant. It’s done this to me,” there’s anger in her tone now, and she jabs her pinched fingers at her chest. “I don’t know how, but damned if I can deny it any longer. So new question. Am I in danger? Is it even possible for me to carry this thing to term?”

She can tell that Kalonia believes her (not on a medically trained and rational level, but that hardly matters right now). Leia watches her sweep her gaze across her, consider her General’s grey-white hair, her thin and crooked fingers, her hunched back. 

After a long silence the doc says, “You’re okay. If you’re really two months in, your risk of miscarriage and maternal complications aren’t much different than they were thirty years ago. It’s just the conception that I can’t get my head around. General, I hope you believe me when I tell you that this cannot be your biological child.”

She does believe it. The depth of it is terrifying. You spend your life fighting a war that is so much bigger than you and what you learn is that the universe doesn’t care, the universe is merciless matter and energy and it doesn’t even know you’re there even when they’re burning a whole planet to ashes before your eyes. It makes you stop caring about people, after a while, except as numbers on your volunteer reserves list. The Force sees people like that but even moreso, Leia believes. It reacts – sometimes to things that haven’t even happened yet – but it doesn’t _care_. And to suddenly have that mind-crushingly huge, uncaring universe reacting inside her, inside her body, perhaps because of who her father was or because of who her brother failed to become... it makes a person feel very small. 

“I bled a lot with Ben,” Leia says, and the sound of that name in her own mouth is more of a trial than the bizarre announcement she just made. “A _lot_. That’s half the reason we didn’t try for another.” 

(Less than half the reason. There were a lot of reasons. She was busy. Han was unhappy. Ben was… Ben. It wasn’t a hard choice to stop there.)

“Then that’s a risk we’ll deal with when it comes,” Kalonia raises her brows. “That’s _if_ you want to go all the way.”

Leia clicks her tongue and downs the rest of the glass. It burns in her throat. It might have to be the last drink she has for a while. That’s a horrible thought.

“I gotta talk to Luke first,” she says. 

Kalonia’s brows somehow go up even further. 

 

\---[]---

 

She hails Luke on an encrypted frequency patched through several different proxies. She doesn’t know where he is, but he must be mobile, because he’s jumped into conversation range of their radios. They’ve been in touch like this several times since he became the last Jedi (again). 

“You shouldn’t go through with this,” Luke says, immediately. No cautious probing from him. He knows Leia isn’t calling for platitudes. They’re too old and too familiar for that.

“Well, glad you believe me.”

“If you don’t doubt it, I don’t doubt you,” Luke’s voice is clear enough to feel like he’s right beside her. Damn, she misses him. She wishes she wasn’t too cowardly to tell him, but if he came back to her it would mean coming back to the war, and she can’t put that decision on his shoulders again. 

“Luke, if the Force did this, maybe I should see how it plays out. It has to mean something—”

He cuts in with exactly what she’s been thinking herself. “Have you forgotten about the last time this happened?” 

“Yeah. You and me happened. Well, one degree removed.”

He scoffs. She remembers a chatty, sand-haired boy too confident for his own good and smiles to herself. “I mean it, Leia. If the Force wants this to happen, it’ll find someone else. You’ve chosen a path with more than enough responsibilities for one person. Say ‘no’ to this one.”

“Don’t you have anything more, well, Jedi-ish for me?” she grumbles. “Any grand philosophies from the Old Order? Any messages from the life-hum of the galaxy? Any… feelings? About what this means?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I wish I did. Maybe being your brother is interfering with my connection to the Force,” and he actually laughs. That’s Han coming through, she thinks. Luke could never bring himself to be that irreverent without Han. He hums. “We’re too old to be called into service now, Leia. And I’m not coming back to teach this one if it turns out to be the next Anakin Skywalker. I can’t do it a third time.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

And then, once they’ve both enjoyed each other’s silence long enough, she says, “Luke, I don’t this one is _one_. I think it’s Finn and Rey.”

 

\---[]---

 

They have been dead for three months.

She tells no one else why she’s getting so fat, except Chewie, of course, who she outlines the whole situation to soon after making up her mind. He has been in and out of the Resistance network in the years since Han was murdered, doing smuggling runs in the Falcon with a series of unreliable co-pilots, helping Leia out when he can. Chewie assures her he would have made the same decision in her position; she wishes Han was here to clarify how literal he’s being. 

She suspects a handful of people notice, but they don’t ask. Who’s going to ask their boss, an old woman with thousands in her underground network, hundreds of armed soldiers and dozens of interstellar warships at her fingertips, why she’s getting so fat? She cackles to herself just imagining it. And it’s not like she’s dressing to show off her figure anyway, these days. The change could easily be explained by too many bread puddings. 

She goes to late-night appointments with Major Kalonia, as infrequently as she can get away with. Kalonia confirms that she is carrying twins, and that apart from a slight increase in her blood pressure everything appears normal. Outside of the med bay, Leia rarely thinks about the consequences of her decision. She could not have made it to this age with her sanity intact if she hadn’t learned to compartmentalise. All she worries about is how much her back hurts, and how she’s had to start wearing thick pads because of her bladder. She’s probably more tired, but she’d barely notices the difference. She’s been tired for years. Decades. 

 

\---[]---

 

They have been dead for eight months, and two days.

The first time Leia has to seriously consider her next move is during a meeting about restoring local representation to a system where they’ve helped drive out the First Order. It’s been a long meeting. They’re almost wrapped up for the night. Leia is starving. It’s been hours since she sent one of the younger captains to fetch a pile of dinners from the canteen. She rubs her back.

“You okay, Ma’am?” Poe asks. Since when does he call her ‘ma’am’? She must look even worse than she feels.

“Fine,” she grumbles. “Just been getting these spasms on and off all day. So we’ve got diplomats who’ve volunteered for all three of these planets, right?”

Someone starts to answer, but she’s stopped listening, having just processed her own words. All day. On and off. Increasingly often, say about, every half an hour now. Shit.

“Okay, okay, sounds great,” she waves off whoever was speaking without thinking about it. “Listen, I’ve just remembered a couple of people I gotta meet tonight. Can you all wrap the rest of this up without me?”

There’s a rumble of assent around the table. They’re all looking at her now, half a dozen sets of eyes (some pairs, one quad), people she trusts with her life. They know something’s wrong. Yet she can’t bring herself to tell them this stupid thing she’s done to herself. She gets out of her chair with a hiss, using the table for support. 

“General Organa?” Poe’s out of his chair too, reaching out to her. 

She looks at him, the one person she should probably have told out of everyone on this whole base. She sighs. “You know what, I might just head off to my quarters for the night. Poe, can I talk to you outside before I go?”

“Sure,” he glances round the table and follows her into the corridor.

As soon as the door has closed behind her, Leia leans into the wall and lets out a long, slow breath. She suddenly realises that she does not want to do this. She does not want another child. She is not a mother any more. “Commander Dameron, get me to the medical bay and call Major Kalonia. Keep things as low profile as you can.”

So when he refuses to leave the med bay, it’s Kalonia who breaks the news to him.

 

\---[]---

 

Poe has been sitting outside the ward for about three hours. Kalonia has cordoned it off to all visitors. Someone runs past him. He recognises Wanoul, a physician’s assistant who usually manages field triages. She’s followed closely by Skits and Ayenee Tore, a couple of dogsbody nurses. They all slam through the doors of the ward, Avenee still pulling on pants over his nightwear. 

“Hey, what’s going on?” Poe yells at the swinging door. He can hear frantic voices on the other side and the hiss of the sterilisation taps. He swears and gets up, sticking his head through the door.

The ward is completely empty after the lull in offensives they’ve had for the past few months. Kalonia had pushed the handful of overnight patients into the larger ward; they were nothing more serious than a cracked rib and a cadet being observed after an allergic reaction. At the far end of the row, Poe can see a cluster of activity. Skits is handing gloves to the new arrivals. Avenee is wheeling over a machine with oxygen tanks. Kalonia leans over a bed. There’s another nurse already here. Poe can’t see the General.

Poe slides into the room, washes his hands in the sink and sprays them with steriliser before jogging closer. “Major, can I help?”

“Out!” Kalonia twists towards him and points an accusing finger at him. “Get out!”

She’s in a gown that’s soaked to the wrists in blood. 

“Oh, no, no,” Poe shakes his head and takes a step closer. “What’s happening? Is she okay? General, talk to me—”

There’s no reply. Kalonia is already turned back to her patient. As the assistants dance between the bed and the supply bench Poe gets a glimpse of bare legs, a mess of grey hair, and more blood. There’s machines beeping like panicked droids and Wanoul is saying a lot of words that Poe knows (because he’s carried a lot of a injured pilots into the med bay) are not good words. 

Poe reaches out for the nearest bed to steady himself. His General was fine when he saw her three hours ago. She was making plans. They have had a good run this season, have made progress against the First Order. For once it looked like everything was on their side. And now he sees a flash of her face, the eyes closed and the mouth panting. She looks old and getting older fast. 

He looks away and sees there’s a human baby laid in the middle of the neighbouring bed. No paediatric incubators in a military medical wing. The baby is pale, almost grey, slimy, wrapped up loosely in a silver emergency blanket. He stares at it, frowning, wondering if he’s hallucinating. He had understood and believed Kalonia’s explanation when he arrived here with the General, but somehow seeing the evidence is different. There shouldn’t be a baby in this place, it’s just not right. 

The baby wriggles, eyes tightly closed, kicking open the blanket.

“Hey, hey,” Poe goes to it and picks it up, notices it’s a girl. He wraps the blanket more tightly around her and cradles her to his chest. 

“Doctor, should we prep a surgical room for Caesarean—?” Wanoul asks. Poe is kind of confused by that. Is this thing in his arms not the General’s?

“No. Stabilise Leia first,” Kalonia wipes her forehead with the sleeve of her gown. One of the machines is suddenly getting more insistent. “Skits – pull that mask over – blood Oh-Two’s dropping – Fuck. Ayenee – defibrillator – now! Now!”

Ayenee runs for the supply closet. Skits is strapping a clear, plastic cup of the General’s mouth and nose. The baby in the crook of Poe’s elbow is whimpering.

“Second one’s coming,” Wanoul says from the end of the bed, where she’s got a stack of gauze pads soaked crimson. “Major, I don’t know what—”

“No, just—”

“The head’s already—”

“Hold it—”

“I’m sorry—”

Wanoul is reaching for a fresh pad with her left hand and holding the head of another child with her right as it lies on the end of the bed, unmoving. Twins. Poe realises the General has twins.

“Her mother died giving birth to twins,” he says faintly, having heard the story from someone at some point in the years he’s worked under Organa. Nobody hears him.

With both hands, Skits takes the baby from Wanoul and looks around. They see Poe and stride towards him, hands outstretched, and he just manages to open up his other elbow before the boy is deposited there. He’s grey too, but browner than his sister, and his fists flex on his chest. 

“Where’s my defib? We’re losing her!” Kalonia shouts.

“I’m getting a new battery!” Ayenee has ripped off his gloves and is frantically scrambling through a drawer of the supply bench. 

And then the boy begins to cry. His sister takes it up a moment later. Poe stares down at them both, two yowling little creatures that seem as loud as a ship’s rockets. 

A moment later Kalonia says, “Heart-rate’s looking more regular.” There’s a note of surprise in her voice. 

“Bleeding’s slowing,” Wanoul adds.

Kalonia looks around at her makeshift delivery ward, finishing her survey on Poe and the two screaming children. “Okay, tell me when you get any sign of the afterbirth. Let’s get a line in and start fluids.”

“Is she gonna be okay?” Poe asks. “Is the General okay?”

Kalonia shoots him a glare, and sighs. “We’ll see. If she is, I can assure you she will not be happy you saw her like this.”

 

\---[]---

 

For a few weeks, the babies live in a little room next door to General Organa, in a crib made out of an old suitcase, with a walkie-talkie taped to the side. Another walkie-talkie tuned to the frequency reserved for this purpose (the ‘Baby Band’, the cadets call it) is in the big mess room where most Resistance members spend their free time. When the babies cry, someone in the mess room – there’s a small group of cadets and pilots who always end up volunteering without ever actually putting their name to the job – goes down and figures out what they need. If it’s formula, they radio through to the kitchen to get some warmed up. If it’s a diaper change, they do it themselves on the table near the crib. If it’s neither, they take the crying baby, or both, for a walk around the base.

Leia has a radio on her belt tuned to the Baby Band as well, so of course she tries to be the one who goes to the little room. But she’s trying to run a Resistance at the same time and sometimes she just can’t leave her post. Sometimes. More times than not. And of course, she’s off base a lot as well. There’s no helping it.

Poe is one of the pilots who is unofficially on the roster, and he jumps to the sound of the Baby Band lighting up as often as he can. Of course he does. Leia called the babies “Rey” and “Finn” from the beginning. He doesn’t get it – none of them do – but he’s always trusted the General’s instinct, right to the edge, and he _believes_ in those names in a way he can’t explain. But Poe is on base less than thirty hours in the average week, and he spends most of those sleeping. He tried to take a walkie to his bunk, but Leia told him to cut it out. She needs him to get his sleep.

“It’s not good for them,” Kalonia warns her, during a check-up to confirm she’s clawing her health back to where it was before the birth. “A different face every visit. Stuck in that little closet most of the time.”

“Newborns sleep twenty hours a day,” Leia frowns, waving her hand. “I’ll work something out when they’re older.”

“General,” Kalonia hums. “You chose to go through with this. Work something out now.”

But a few weeks turns into twelve and the babies are smiling when they hear Poe’s voice but they’re not responsive to the makeshift toys the cadets dangle in front of them. They make noises at each other and try to hold onto each other when picked up, but they seem to merely tolerate the affection of adults. 

Leia cradles Finn after a feed late one night, watching his big, brown eyes roam the room until he sees Rey sleeping in the cot nearby and relaxes. 

He’s so beautiful, soft-edged, his dark skin so warm, every part of him perfectly symmetrical. She feels absolute love for him, and terrible pain resurfacing beneath it. 

She remembers Ben at this age, and how he looked strange to her even then, his limbs too thin, always breathing through his mouth, and she worried about him for reasons she couldn’t explain. She took him to doctors and physicians in the hope that they could give him some pill to cure a childhood illness that never manifested. She blamed herself for years. She’d worried him into an anxious child, and the anxious child had driven his loving but impatient father away, and the fatherless boy placed all his griefs in the lap of his distant uncle, and look what had happened. Look what happened. It was her fault. Later, she wondered if her fears had been a premonition, if it had been a warning from the Force, but what the hell was she supposed to do? Drown her baby to stop Kylo Ren? Eventually those questions became too much. She threw herself into running the Resistance and let the guilt slip under the water. 

She kisses Finn’s head, and he twists away from her, reaching out for his sleeping sister.

“We must all seem like strangers, huh, kid,” she murmured into the soft brush of his hair. “Too many parents is as bad as none at all.” 

Over the next few days Leia evaluates the shrinking pools of Resistance members who have taken charge of the kids, but she can’t spare any of them for a full-time shift. 

When Chewie drops by with a shipment of plasma missiles they need for the border patrol, she runs late to a meeting so she can greet him at the dock and see how he’s going. He’s piloting the Falcon alone. He ditched his latest crew three days earlier. Untrustworthy, he explains. He didn’t want to take them to a Resistance base. He notices she’s not pregnant anymore. She tells him everything went fine, and he asks why she hasn’t got a baby, then? 

“I can’t take a baby to diplomatic meetings,” Leia shakes her head at him. “Let alone two.”

Chewie tells her to get a nanny, or at least, she’s pretty sure that’s what the word means. She misses Han every day. 

“Yeah, I’ll just advertise that on the interstellar network,” she laughs. “Come join the Resistance, spend all day cleaning throw-up out of your flight uniform.”

Chewie shrugs and says he’d do it, if she paid him. 

Leia blinks at him. “Really?”

He nods. He says it’s hard to find a decent crew these days, and maybe he needs a break from smuggling. Just for a few years. She remembers he was always good with Ben. Wookies have got a temper, sure, but they know how to measure it when they need to. 

“ _Really_ , really?” she repeats. 

So Chewie takes the job full time. The falcon sits idle in the back hanger, and the babies are moved into a new bunkroom with Chewie. There’s always more work than people, so the Wookie manages the Resistance’s externally sourced supply routes when they’re asleep. Poe still insists on babysitting as often as he can (“C’mon, General, you can’t let Wookie be their first language,”), but the rest of the group who used to keep their ears pricked for noise from the cot are clearly relieved.

The change is slow but undeniable. The kids smile more, they babble more, they stare into Leia’s eyes when she holds them up to her face. They’re growing so fast, now. Ben grew fast too, Leia tries not to think.

 

\---[]---

 

It has been just shy of four years since they died. Leia walks through a game of tag – or perhaps it’s a game of catch, she can’t be sure – on her way to central control. Poe and Oddy Muva are chasing two laughing, screaming toddlers through the corridors, as a handful of infantry join in on their way to a briefing. A wadded-up strip of papyrus armour is tossed back and forth from a pilot to a soldier and back towards the children, to groans from Poe that they just broke the rules. Finn charges off with the ball held in front of him in both hands. 

Leia pauses to watch. She rarely thinks of the unspoken Others, but it comes back to her now, how Finn once told her his earliest memory was of walking through the snow in lines with other children. She thinks of how Rey always spoke of her missing family in abstracts like she’d created them out of a picture-book, and when pressed to recall a happy anecdote from childhood, described a favourite meal or seeing a flower behind glass for the first time, and never mentioned any people with whom she shared the moment. Now the little girl with Rey’s name is swinging between the outstretched hands of two young infantrymen, yelling for them to go higher. And she has a brother who will never leave her, never abandon her in the desert like scrap, and Finn has a sister who will fight for him and beside him no matter where he goes. Maybe the headquarters of an insurgency isn’t the best place to raise children but for fuck’s sake, it could be _worse_. 

Finn bumps into Leia’s legs, bounces off but keeps his balance. He looks up at her with wide eyes. And then, clutching the ball to his chest with one hand, he raises his other arm and touches his forehead in an unmistakeable salute.

“Gen’rl Organa,” he says. Leia’s breath catches in her throat. 

Poe has arrived behind him, and crouches to touch his shoulder. He points up at Leia and says in a voice he might use to describe a particularly bright nebula in the night sky. “Finn, that’s your Momma.” 

Finn looks at him with all the scathing that a three-year-old can manage. “I _know_.”

Leia lets her breath out again with a smile.

 

\---[]---

 

It has been five years since they died. 

The Resistance evacuates the D’Qar base with a couple of days notice. It’s sad to go, after it has been home for near on a decade, but this used to be the norm much more frequently. Some of the newer recruits are in a bit of a mess but everyone else has done this at least once. 

Leia sends a squadron to chase down the First Order scouts that they caught scanning the planet for their precise location. They make it out to one of D’Qar’s moons before the scouts turn around and engage them. There’s a handful of fighters waiting to back up the scouts, hiding behind the ice-covered moon’s shadow, and it turns bad quickly.

“That’s two ships down,” Ensign Goode reports while Leia is coordinating the pack-up on the ground. But Leia’s always got an ear on the cans, and Goode’s next words stun her. “Black One is mayday, mayday. Black one is down. Contact lost.”

Poe Dameron is gone.

There’s only one squadron up there, so Snap is in charge on the ground. “Black Two, take command.” 

Leia goes to the terminal and follows the traces of their ships. But she’s got an evacuation in progress and she can’t leave it for one pilot. Not even Poe. 

They destroy all the scouts and fighters, which might buy them some time. When the heat is off about an hour later and the squadron’s been recalled, Leia gets on the radio and calls Black Two, Oddy Muva. “Black Two, what can you confirm the loss of Commander Dameron?”

“He took a grazing hit, General, I think it cut the central hydraulic line and he couldn’t control his angle. He went down over the moon.”

Leia takes a breath. “Is there any chance he could have survived? Has his ship’s locator beacon been activated?”

Oddy is silent. You lose a lot of friends in this job, they all know that. But Leia has known Poe since he was four years old, the same age as the babies. A few shy of forty years. Finally Oddy says, “His last mayday call said he was losing pressure in the cockpit. Even if the crash somehow didn’t kill him, and I’m sure it did… the temperature down there is negative a hundred Celcius. Oxygen less than one percent. He’d be braindead in twenty minutes and frozen solid in thirty. I’m sorry, General.”

“Thank you, Black Two. See you back at base.”

She goes back to the evacuation, goes into a trance of multi-focus efficiency that has come in handy many times before. About twenty minutes later, a mottle-skinned cadet in training gear comes running up, gasping for breath. “General. Sorry. Sorry to bother. There’s a – a situation – ”

“I’ve got about twelve of those on my hands already, cadet, you’re gonna have to be specific,” she barks.

The cadet catches her breath and points down the corridor he came from. “With your, uh, your kids.”

Leia isn’t having it. “Chewie can deal with it. Just get them off the planet.”

The cadet looks between her and the corridor. Leia isn’t sure about his non-human expression, but the body language seems frantic. “Ma’am… Chewbacca… he threatened me with severe bodily harm if I didn’t fetch you immediately…”

“You speak Wookie?” 

“No, but Medic Wanoul is there too, and she translated.”

Chewie wouldn’t call a medic in the middle of an evacuation if something wasn’t serious. Leia pauses, tells Snap to take over for five minutes, and follows the Cadet back to the kids’ room.

She can hear Rey howling from several doors away. When she enters the room, the first thing she takes in is the mess. Their small hanger of clothes has been knocked over, paper scattered across the floor, and several precious coloured crayons crushed into the grill under Leia’s feet. Rey is in the centre of the room, thumping her fists and knees on the threadbare rug. Her screams fill the small space like buffets of wind. Wanoul is squatting on the floor, trying to talk to Rey without making a gap in the screams. For a moment Leia cannot even spot Finn, but finally she sees him tucked into the corner between the wall and the end of the single bed that the toddlers share, a blanket wrapped completely around his body but for two little sock-clad feet sticking out the bottom.

The four year olds have been drilled for an evacuation several times since they were old enough to walk, and are used to the occasional emergency retreat into the bunkers at the bottom of the base. Rey has a bit of a temper when she’s tired or hungry, but not in four years has Leia ever seen a tantrum like this. Chewie is shoving clothes into the suitcase that the twins have been taught to pack in an evacuation. He has evidently decided he will simply carry the children and all their possessions to the evac ship. 

Rey becomes aware of Leia and raises her head, stretching her arms to Leia. “Momma! Momma, help me!”

Leia crosses the room, grabs her arms and hauls her up onto her feet. Rey’s eyes are red and her cheeks dripping tears. “Rey. We are in an evacuation. You need to pack and go with Chewie.”

“No! No,” Rey turns the word into a long howl like an animal and screws up her face again. 

“Look at me, this is very serious,” Leia does not quite shake the child, but she lowers her head and gives her arms a squeeze. She has to shout over Rey’s screaming. “We need to go.”

Chewie growls something over the racket. Leia turns to look at him. “Poe? What do you mean, they want Poe?” when Chewie shrugs, she turns to Wanoul. “Who the hell told them about Poe?”

“What about Poe?” Wanoul frowns. “Can you get him? It’s the only thing they keep asking for. Both of them.”

Leia groans and realises with a sinking grief what has happened. They sensed it. But they’re so young! Even Ben showed no signs at this age… Maybe the shock has awakened something in them that time alone could not.

“Sweetheart, Poe’s not coming with us,” she pleads with the sobbing Rey. “Poe’s gone. I’m sorry. We can talk about this later.”

“He’s not. He’s not. He’s needs us,” Rey wails, and when Leia stands up and tries to lift her she struggles and kicks out so hard that Leia will find bruises on her shins tomorrow. She is really scared now that Rey will hurt herself. 

“Please, Rey, please,” Leia’s back hurts, and she doesn’t have the strength to lift the girl while she’s fighting her.

Rey goes suddenly quite, reduced to a soft whimpering as she continues to thrash in Leia’s arms. It’s not for Leia’s benefit, however, but because Finn has begun to speak. From the corner by the bed the edge of his face appears over the curve of the blanket and he sniffs, “He’s so cold, Momma. Poe’s so cold. Please, can we go help him? Please!”

Leia feels the grief turn to fear like a broken bone digging into her throat. She looks at Wanoul. “Has anyone talked to them in the last hour? Anyone? How can he know where Poe went down?”

Wanoul just shrugs, and Chewie answers her. No one has been into the children’s room, and they have not left it. 

Leia grabs Rey’s face. “Rey, look at me,” she waits until she has the girl’s gaze. “I want to help Poe. But you have to help me first, okay?”

At last, the tantrum seems to be subsiding. Rey blinks away tears, wiping at the snot under her nose. 

Leia nods at Chewie. “Find two of the ships ready for evac and gets Rey on one and Finn on the other. Make sure they’re search and rescue capable. Get the coordinates from Oddy Muva where Poe went down and have them do a fly-by over the moon, looking for a beacon.”

“Why two?” Wanoul asks.

“Because there’s no point going down there unless both kids pick the same heading,” Leia straightens up her aching back. She holds out her hand to Finn. “Come on, baby, let’s go find him.”

Chewie, rumbling his discontent, picks the suitcase up under one arm and heads out at a jog. 

 

\---[]---

 

In a tiny med-bay on board the largest evac ship, Leia leans towards Kalonia in the cramped ship’s corridor. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

Kalonia glances through the window where Poe Dameron lies bandaged and dozing. His cheeks and the tips of his nose are a fierce red with frostbite, and there’s red bleeding through some of the patches that cover his cuts and bruises. One leg is propped up away from his body, wrapped in casting tape and a steel cage.

“That famous luck of his must have pushed itself to the limit,” Kalonia shakes her head as she turns back to Leia. “He managed to set the autopilot to land before depressurisation knocked him out. Snap said it looks like his manual hydraulics were cut but not the autos. The ship dumped itself in a snowbank, or an icefall hit it right after he crashed, it’s not clear. Either way, the snow sealed the breached cockpit. BB-8 switched life support to the auxiliary tank to bring oxygen close to normal. Space was small enough that his body heat kept him going long enough for us to find him. BB-8 too.”

“He’s Shara’s son, that’s for sure,” Leia mutters.

Kalonia nods. “That leg won’t ever be the same.”

“Will he fly again?” 

It’s a fair question for a friend to ask, but she knows it sounds like a General reckoning her assets. 

“We’ll see,” Kalonia says quietly. 

Leia heads back to where Chewie is holding two very small hands. Finn strains away from the wookie, towards the door of the med bay. Rey clings to Chewie’s leg, sucking on her thumb. Leia summons them with a twitch of her hand and Chewie releases him. They both bolt for the door, bumping against her in the small corridor. 

“Now be gentle, guys, he’s still sick,” Leia calls to them.

“Yes, Momma!” two reckless voices, paying her lip-service. She smiles as Kalonia opens the door and they slide through the gap. 

She has to get back to the control centre. She knows from experience that sleep is a long, long time away for her. But she waits for a moment to look through into the warm, yellow light of the med bay.

“Kids!” Poe is awake, his voice tired and a little slurred from the painkillers, but he pushes the blankets down to his waist and sits up. Finn and Rey bounce to the side of the bed and reach for him. He throws out his arms and pulls them up into the small bunk, even though she can see him wincing from all the way over here. “I heard what you did. I’m so proud of you, my clever babies.” He kisses the tops of their heads.

“We love you, Poe,” Rey wraps her arms around his neck and he feigns choking until she loosens up, giggling at him. Finn echoes her as he cuddles against Poe’s side, “We love you!”

“I love you too,” Poe hugs them against his body, tips his head back so they don’t see him blink back a couple of tears. “Thanks. Thanks for coming back for me.”

 

\---[]---

 

They lose a pilot a few weeks later on a routine patrol, while they’re squatting in a marshy region of a smuggler’s paradise planet. Search and rescue comes back after two days with their heads bowed and bags under their eyes.

“His last transmission said he was having mechanical issues,” Snap tells Leia. He wants to continue the search for another day. “He was going to try and dump in the swamp.”

“No one can detect his emergency beacon,” Leia points out. “We have to call off the search. This area’s too dangerous to spare the ships any longer.”

“Not yet,” Snap pleads. “General, can’t the kids do their Force thing? Like they did with Poe?”

Leia looks at him. She doesn’t even know what to say. It doesn’t work like that. No, that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that they’re four years old. 

“It’s worth a try, right?” Snap pushes. 

How can she argue about the weight of responsibility to him – to people who volunteered to die her service? Instead Leia croaks, “It doesn’t work like that.”

She goes to Poe afterwards and asks him what people have been saying in the mess hall, in the bunkrooms, in the long stretches watching empty perimeter feeds.

He grimaces at last. “They say they’re gonna be just like Luke Skywalker when they grow up. But even better. They say they’re gonna save the galaxy.”

This is the way it starts. 

Too soon, too soon.

 

\---[]---

 

It has been six years and ten months since they died.

A secret always gets out sooner or later, especially when all the relevant parties can sense a change in the balance of the intergalactic power that binds together all living things. And so the Order comes sooner rather than later: these children, if they exist, should be removed from the custody of the enemy and brought to the Supreme Leader.

The Resistance central base is on the windswept Maridun, where the disperse water and unceasing weather means grasses dominate the ecosytem and all megafauna have long been driven extinct by the various sentient species that have eked out a living here. It’s a planet old by the life span of a planet, with a slow, near-dormant core that has reduced tectonic movement to a minimum for a few hundred million years. Weather has worn down the mountains and the valleys to an endless, flat tundra and there is no permanent habitation beyond the occasional pirate port. The base is set up in one of the larger mountain ranges, but by most standards it’s barely more than a spine of rocky hills stretching for a thousand miles around a band just above the equator. 

But even at this miserable edge of the galaxy, there are spies, and Kylo Ren is patient. He will go alone; he has his reasons, buried deep in his own mind. The driving mechanisms behind his thoughts are shattered, like his face. He is good at separating the pieces these days, for his own sanity, and to protect them from his Leader. But he cannot strike the heart of the base while That Woman is there. She will know. She will know. 

He waits until his spies tell him she is leaving (no one can say where, it does not matter, he does not want to think on That Woman for long, for it spurs some of the old cogs that have not spun in years). Then he takes a stealth ship and slips through the Resistance patrol ships like oil over the surface of a lake. 

He thinks it may be difficult to find the children. He barely believes they exist, and certainly the rumours cannot be true about their origin. They are Force-sensitive foundlings, he supposes, adopted by That Woman simply for the spiteful purpose of keeping them from a greater destiny. He may have to go deep into the base, kill many Resistance fighters, which is good but inelegant. A wasteful journey for a prize he does not believe will be worth the rumours.

But he senses them before he even lands and disembarks the stealth ship on a silent, black speeder. By the stars! Stronger than even Snoke suspected. Stronger than the cursed pair that his grandfather bore. As strong as his grandfather? He wishes he knew. Strange – impossibly strange. 

He waits in the hilltops above the base. He is not disappointed. The children pay the border no heed, crawling through a well-worn dip under the razor wire while a sentry waves them on with a wink and a finger to his lips. Ren watches them through a long-distance scope as they go wandering far past the fields and roads of the Resistance hive. No one accompanies them. The area is isolated and empty, with little danger besides a few half-hidden streams, steep gullies and some sharp species of grasses.

He watches them climb into the hills, stopping only to hunt for insects and lizard-like creatures, catch them in their hands and carry them until they get bored and then let them fall to the ground, forgotten. They have biscuits in their pockets and they stop to eat them by a small, tannin-brown pool, throwing stones into its depths. He can see their faces now, snapping images with the digital scope and blowing them up to inspect them. There are crumbs around their mouths and their hands are dirty, not just with the dust from their walk but with motor oil and ink. Their clothes are a patchwork of hand-sown adaptations of Resistance garb and hand-me-downs from child-sized species. They sport matching lengths of hair, the girl’s chopped into a fringe and a short bob, the boy’s an afro in all directions. They are never more than a few feet from each other.

Ren looks at the small faces and covers the girl’s eyes with the pad of one gloved finger. He remembers the pain of a lightsaber slash across his cheek, and a pair of brown eyes as the light left them on that rain-sluiced wall seven years ago. The different parts of his mind are waking up, each piece of the machine whirring, but they are not in sync. He will take the girl and leave the boy; his orders were to bring both to the leader, but he will find some excuse for that failing. One is enough. 

He lowers the scope and reaches out for the girl with the Force. _Come along_ , he whispers. _Come this way_. It does not remind him of another voice inside the skull of a boy called Ben, many years ago, because Ben is long dead. 

The girl raises her head as if listening. She gets up and walks away from her brother, clambering over the rocks, her feet following a thread that only she can feel between her fingertips. 

_Come to me_ , he hums, and she wanders through the tussocks and over the ridge. She crouches onto her heels to skid down the gully towards his speeder. She walks between two cliffs and comes out on the plateau where he waits.

When she sees him her eyes go wide and she takes a step backwards. She reaches her hand behind her, searching for a brother that is not there. Realising she is alone, she opens her mouth to scream. But he has already crossed the distance between them. He raises his hand and touches her forehead with one finger. Her eyes fall closed and he sweeps her up with one arm before she hits the ground. Limp in his arms, she is heavier than he expected. Somehow he thought she would be made of paper, yet she seems to weigh just the same as she did the last time he took her away (he would never admit, of course, that his body is weaker than he was that day on Takodana). 

He turns towards the speeder, and as he does so he hears a small voice cry out. “Rey!”

He glimpses the boy coming through the gully, padding footsteps turning into a run. Kylo Ren would ignore him, for the speeder is not far and the boy’s legs are short, but then he hears the crackle of a radio.

He turns back and throws out his hand to knock the walkie talkie from the boy’s grasp. So they were not entirely unsupervised. He should have spotted it on the scope. The radio flies away, smashes against the rocks nearby and drops to the grass, still buzzing static. The boy gapes at his empty hands, and then he breaks into a sprint directly towards Ren.

Ren turns back to the speeder again, but there are small hands latching onto his belt and hauling on it. “Let her go! Let her go!”

He pushes the boy off easily with one hand, but he gets up again and grabs the trail of Ren’s cloak. The child is dragged through the grass towards the vehicle, one of the knees on his worn trousers ripping open. He is yelling loud enough to echo against the rocks.

Ren looks down at him “Go back,” he says, pushing the boy away with the thrust of one foot. “Go back to your mother.”

“Give me my sister!” the boy growls, grabbing for his ankle.

“Go back and be a better son,” Ren says, and the walls break down between two machinations in his mind. He did not want the girl, he simply could not take the boy, could not take another son from That Woman. 

He must eradicate sentiment.

Ren waves his hand. The boy is thrown backwards by the Force, landing among a thick cluster of tussock twenty feet away. Ren hears the gasp of air leaving his lungs. He heads for the speed, walking faster now.

“Come back!” the boy pushes himself out of the grass, wheezing from his half-winded chest. “Rey!”

The girl stirs against Ren’s shoulder. He starts. She should not have shaken off the trance so quickly. Suddenly she begins to struggle in earnest. “Get off! Help! Finn, help!”

She is snarling, lips pulled back from her teeth as he seizes her with both hands and tries to hold her close. She is horribly real and alive, so different from the sterile, mechanical, military world in which he has lived for so long. And then she looks down at his hip and kicks out. “Finn, catch!”

As her foot strikes it, the lightsaber breaks from its clasp on his belt and flies through the air. Ren spins to see it land in the boy’s hands, looking absurdly large. He holds it out from his body, considering it for a moment with wide eyes. His thumb moves towards the button.

Kylo Ren has a vision, which is not a premonition from the Force, but a mere flash of manifested fear; the boy too small to wield a full-sized lightsaber, lying glassy-eyed in the grass with a hole burned through him. 

“No! Stop!” he cries, throwing out his hand again. The strength of the push is dangerous. The boy’s eyes roll back in his head and he slumps into the grass, still clutching the lightsaber with one hand.

“Finn! Finn!” the girl screams, frightened now. He drops her onto the ground, holding onto her upper arm hard enough to bruise. There is no excuse left. If he brings the girl alone, Snoke will know that he felt compassion for the boy, that he left him helpless. He would have failed.

He takes them both.

 

\---[]---

 

Poe limps back from a shift in flight command. He has not flown in two years, but he works the bad leg every day, gaining strength (or so he convinces himself). He doesn’t need his cane for short walks anymore, just for the long days in the flight instructor school where he’s training the next generation of pilots. He greets Jess in the big intersection that leads to the hanger. She is heading out on patrol. He kisses her cheek, and she wrinkles her nose at the scratch of his thick beard, her eyes smiling.

“Where’s the kids?” he asks, looking around. “I was gonna take them for lessons.”

Poe has decided to try and teach the babies (as the pilots still call them, since they are the only permanent children on the base) for basic schooling; their letters and numbers, and weapons safety. He manages about an hour a day, a handful of days a week, until he or the children get sick of it. Jess is not convinced they are learning anything yet except how to distract Poe. 

Jess shrugs. “Probably hiding from your boring lessons.”

“Seriously,” he looks around again. “They promised they’d meet me here.”

“I think they were at breakfast. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Poe wanders around until he finds Snap. “Has anyone seen the babies?”

Snap shakes his head. “They went off into the grasslands again, I think.”

“Did they take their walkie?”

“They always take their walkie. They know how much trouble they’ll be in if they don’t.”

Poe sits down at an empty station and tunes into the frequency of the children’s radio. Snap is looking over his shoulder, pretending to be busy with some maps. “Hey, Finn, Rey, how far away are you? I gotta take a sleep shift in a couple of hours.”

He waits for the familiar, little voices babbling over the radio, usually fighting over holding the handset and just intelligible enough to communicate. There’s nothing but silence. Poe thumbs the button again, “Kids, I mean it, if you don’t tell me where you are, your momma’s gonna hear about it.”

Nothing. Snap leans over. “Maybe they’re down in the basement,” he suggests. “Or they dropped the walkie into a stream.”

Poe does a quick circuit of the base, asking anyone who doesn’t look too busy for information. The consistent story is that the kids wandered off a few hours ago, away from the perimeter. Poe is starting to worry. He doesn’t worry about them very often. There are two of them – even if one got into trouble, the other would come looking for help. What can possibly be wrong?

Maridun has a fifty-hour day-night cycle, of which there are ten hours of solid sunlight left today. That’s a lot of time before the freezing night. But Poe wants to get his sleep, and he doesn’t trust anyone on the base to make a concerted effort to find the kids in the meantime. By the time he wakes up again there will be very less than an hour before the temperature starts to drop. 

He has one of the techies activate the emergency beacon in the walkie that he had made for the kids. The pings are loud on the search module; they’re not more than a mile away. That’s a relief. Poe takes a speeder and a cadet called Karé off into the hills to pick them up. 

Up into the hills and over a ridge, the pings tell them they’re metres away from the spot, but there’s no sign of the kids. “Finn. Rey. Talk to me,” Poe says into his radio, and hears his voice echoing back to him.

They find the walkie in the grass. It’s still working, but its panel is scratched and hanging off busted screws as if its been smashed against the rock. Poe feels real fear for the first time.

“Finn!” he bellows into the empty gully, and across the tundra below, leaning heavily on his cane. “Rey!”

Karé kicks half-heartedly at the grass. “They probably got lost and dropped the walkie, Boss. We’ll get a patrol ship to do a thermo-scan of the area.”

Poe’s heart is beginning to race. He looks up the gully. He limps over the uneven ground to the edge of the plateau where they’re standing, looking over at the steep slope beyond for the shape of two small bodies. He’s already imagining the crunch of Finn’s skull against a rock as he tripped and rolled down the hill, imagining crimson splatters on Rey’s unconscious face. But the slope’s not that steep, and really, he knows from his own rough-and-tumble childhood that it takes a lot to hurt a kid bad enough that they can’t move or cry for help. He knows how loud Rey and Finn can scream when they want to.

As he looks back towards the cadet, his gaze slides across the grass nearby. He lugs himself over to the other side of the plateau. There’s a rectangular patch of wilted grass, flattened and faintly brown.

“Look at this,” Poe crouches down on his good leg. “There was a landspeeder parked here.”

“Could have been a patrol,” Karé suggests.

“It’s not one of ours – too small. Compact enough to fit in a small ship,” Poe looks up at the ridge and points. “From the top of the gully you’d have a clear view of the whole base and the surrounding area. With a good scope you’d spot the kids, if you were waiting for them.”

Karé leans over, propping his hands on his knees. “You’re paranoid, boss. No ship could get into this _hemisphere_ without us spotting it.”

“Maybe,” Poe straightens up. He tunes the walkie to central command. “Goode, it’s Poe. Did any of the controllers report anomalous signals in their sector in the last twelve hours? Anything passed off as space junk or the like? I’m thinking there’ll be a matching signal in the last two hours.” 

“Roger that Poe, I’ll ask around. Urgent?”

Poe takes a second, swallows, thumbs the transmission. “Urgent. Thanks.”

By the time they get back to base Poe is due to start his sleep shift in less than an hour, but he knows he wouldn’t sleep even if Snap wrestled him into bed himself. He’s trying to get the analysts (who handle all classified intel, including from Resistance spies and interceptions) onto the situation but they want to know how long the kids have been missing (no one is sure) and say they won’t devote resources to them until someone’s done a thermo-sweep of the area (they haven’t). Poe is sure they’re not just lost. He’s sure of it. He’s just starting to raise his voice when Karé taps him on the shoulder.

“Commander,” the cadet’s tone is flat and serious compared to his bored mood up on the ridge. “It’s the General.”

A ringing starts in Poe’s ears. He takes the handset and raises it to his mouth. “General Organa,” his voice comes out as a croak and he clears his throat. “Afternoon, General. I thought you were offline for another few days.”

“I know, Poe, so don’t tell anyone I’m calling or they’ll all start bothering me,” the General sounds warm, only a little on edge. She’s on what Poe thinks is her first holiday in about ten years. Maybe she’s just calling to assure herself they can run the Resistance without her. “Everything alright down there?”

“Of course. Of course,” Poe can’t exactly tell her anything else when he’s the only one who seems to think anything is wrong.

“Great. Good job,” he can hear the smile in her voice. A matching smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. If Leia thinks everything is fine, then everything is fine. “Listen, uh, I have a bit of a foolish question for you.”

Poe’s throat closes up. He can’t even make a squeak to acknowledge that he’s listening, but she mumbles on regardless. “I just… I know it’s probably just anxiety about being away from command, but I have a bad feeling about the babies. Have you seen the little terrors today? They’re not… I don’t know, sick, or anything?” she sighs down the line and mutters. “Don’t I just sound like an old woman.”

“General—” Poe manages to rasp. “I – I don’t know what to tell you, but—”

Instantly, her tone is not a mellow vacationer, but a general, his General. “Dameron, tell me. Now.”

“They’re missing. They wandered off the base a few hours ago and no one’s seen them since. I found their radio near some landspeeder tracks that don’t belong to us, and there’s two blips on the patrol scans that suggest that maybe the stealth ship that caught us off guard in Sullust last year could have breached our perimeter. General, that’s a worst case scenario, but I think… I think it’s possible someone was spying on the base and took them. Took them off planet.”

A moment of silence, and then she says. “It was him. I felt him… one degree removed, an echo, through the kids…”

“General…”

“I’m coming back right away. Get all the intel you can.”

 

\---[]---

 

Leia had gone to visit Luke for the week. It is a long time to be without her responsibilities. It makes her feel light-headed, like some deep-sea creature coming up towards the light, unable to bear the world without the pressure of a million tonnes of ocean above it. 

Luke had gripped her shoulders when he saw her, smiled at her through his beard, which was longer and greyer than ever. He looked well, living in a small commune not far from Maridun, living under the name Lore Tekka (claiming kinship to an old friend too dead to dispute it). She couldn’t imagine what she looked like to his eyes. 

But she’d still found a way to make the visit a business trip. She couldn’t break the habit of a lifetime. She had an ulterior motive.

“No,” he’d said, as they sat drinking tea by a freshwater lake. “I’m not going to train them.”

“I know it’ll be hard to see Rey. I know how much she meant to you,” Leia pressed. “But they’re strong, Luke. Stronger than I could have imagined. I don’t think I’m up to the job of teaching them to control that strength.”

“You chose this,” Luke says, which seems cruel, but she’s asking a cruel thing of him. He turns towards her and his eyes are full of kindness. “You taught Ben well, before you sent him to me. I was the one who lost sight of him, Leia. We don’t have to make that mistake again.”

“Luke, all I can teach them is to lock up their talents, to keep the Force sleeping inside, isn’t it a waste—”

Luke’s mouth turns down sharply and he looks out over the lake. “Don’t start that. They’re six years old, by the Stars, they’re not soldiers you need to arm.”

She pulls in a long, slow breath. “You’re right. You’re right.”

But she cannot shake the feeling – the fear – that they were sent to her for a reason. 

They’d spent the day reminiscing, and for the first time in a long time Leia wondered if there could be a life for her after the war, if the war ended in her lifetime. Then the unease had begun to spread in her gut. She’d dismissed it as anxiety about her absence from the base, until it had become so distracting she had to call home, just to check, just to alleviate her fears. 

And her worst fears were true.

 

\---[]---

 

She is back on the base and it feels like slipping back into her body. Her arms are a thousand pilots, infantry, engineers, her eyes a hundred analysts and spies, her feet are the ships and the speeders, her body is all the medics and cooks and cleaners that are no less precious for not being on the front line. Luke travelled with her, unannounced on his arrival, brushed aside as a strange companion. All focus is on Leia and her orders.

“I’m so sorry,” Poe is one of the first to reach her, of course. “I’m sorry, General, I’m sorry, I let them go wherever they wanted with nothing but that walkie—”

“That’s enough,” she snaps at him, and reaches out to grab his shoulder. “We all watched them go wild. You think the First Order couldn’t have grabbed them from right out of your classroom if they wanted to? Of course they could have, and you’d be dead then instead of sorry. Get your head locked down, Dameron.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“They took my babies,” she growls, turning on the spot to address them all. “They took my babies so they can turn them into Sith and I will not let that happen!”

She sends her arms and eyes in search of any information, any hint of where _he_ has taken them. She has a dozen extraction teams suiting up, waiting for a location. But in a pause in the action Luke takes her elbow and turns her aside to say softly, “I’ll go after them.”

“No, I can’t ask that of you.”

“I’ll go,” he repeats, more firmly. “I’ll go alone. And I’ll bring them back,” he glances around. “You’ve got good people, Leia, but they’re not ready for a fight with Kylo Ren.”

She holds his gaze. “Alright, I’ll give you a First Order ship we captured a few months ago, we’ve got some stolen access codes as well,” she says. “Get me confirmation of their location and I’ll send a team in after you.”

He nods, and they embrace. She can feel his spine even through his robes, and she feels short and fat in his arms. 

Too soon, too soon.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the “Major character death” warning also applies to this chapter. I love tragedy but I don’t want to foist it on anyone against their will.

It has been six years and ten months since they died, but only forty-eight hours of hell since they disappeared. Leia has barely slept. Other missions, other priorities, have been diverted towards the question of _where are my children?_ And she wonders – of course she does – if she is being selfish. But they did the same when Poe was captured, they do the same when any member of the Resistance vanishes into the maw of the enemy and cannot be confirmed mercifully dead. And this is even worse. Kylo Ren is the coldest, the cruellest, the strongest single creature in the First Order. It is a reasonable fear that their enemies may swell that human weapon from one to three (and her babies are more powerful than Ben was at their age, she’s very sure of it). It is a reasonable concern for anyone coordinating one half of a war.

“General,” a Togruta girl she doesn’t recognise is on the vid-line. “There’s a ship that’s been detected in orbit around Maridun. It’s broadcasting a distress beacon but it’s not responding to our communications. The patrol that found it thinks it might be the ship that Skywalker took.”

She says Leia’s brother’s name as if she doesn’t know his relationship to her General. Perhaps she doesn’t. He is still mythological to many of the young ones. 

“Have the patrol detected any weaponry on board?” she asks.

“None on the scans.”

“Any life?”

“Yes, General. Patrol’s keeping their distance, so they’ve got no more details.”

“Send up a spacewalk team and crack the airlock if they can,” Leia tells her.

Poe, of course, puts himself on the team. She gets the overview of the mission over the radio before they return, but she has Poe meet her later to flesh it out. He describes the mission to her thusly, when they’re sitting over a drink together later that night, in her personal quarters:

 

\---[]---

 

The spacewalk team latched onto the stolen First Order ship as it orbited the planet at approximately twenty thousand miles an hour. Its engines sat idle but its warning lights flashed on and off in the darkeness, a red and green star hanging in the void. The airlock was unencrypted, and there was no need to cut through once they’d made a seal. It opened to them eagerly.

Poe confirmed that the silent ship’s lift support was working as normal. He re-pressurised the airlock, took off his helmet and opened the inner door. The main cabin beyond was dim, lit only by a few winking lights from control panels on the walls. The artificial gravity was normal. The air smelled of blood, sweat, and urine. The beam of his torch shone around rows of folded seats against the walls until it came to the end of the cabin. Two small figures sat there, strapped into seats too big for them, their heads nodding in sleep, their hands clasped and hanging between their bodies. Unmoving.

“Kids!” Poe croaked, lurching across the cabin. 

Finn’s head rose from his chest, blinking. Rey blinked awake a moment kater, yawning.

“Poe!” two little voices, two pairs of arms reaching out to him, and they both began to cry in sync. “Poe!”

He unclipped their seatbelts with shaking hands while one of his team found the switches and the cabin filled with bright, white light. Poe grunted as the kids launched themselves onto him, both clinging so tight he could barely breathe, but that was okay because the lump in his throat was too big for air to get round it. 

“Are you alright?” he croaked at last. “Are you hurting anywhere?”

“Uncle Luke saved us,” Rey sniffed. 

“Uncle Luke strapped us in and said to go to sleep,” Finn added. “He said not to mess with the seatbelts for anything, even if we needed to go.”

“He said we’d be home soon,” Rey finished.

This was the first time, to his knowledge, that they had even heard about ‘Uncle Luke’, which meant Master Skywalker had introduced himself to them that way. Poe found himself grinning. Family is so important.

“Commander,” the orbit recovery specialist who was leading the team stood over them. “I think you’d better see the cockpit. Maybe… maybe put the kids in the ship first.”

“No!” Rey squealed, gripping him even tighter. “Don’t go!”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Poe stood up with a grunt, his bad leg going into spasms for a moment. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He put them in the recovery ship where Major Kalonia was waiting. He thought he could see a sheen of tears in her eyes, but he wasn’t going to say anything. As he detached himself from Finn, he noticed something.

“Kid, what’s on your hands?” he asked, taking Finn’s wrist to inspect his open palm. “Is this blood? Who’s blood is this?”

Finn wiped his nose with his other sleeve, which was also splattered with dried, brown stains. “I tried to help Uncle Luke,” he said.

Poe kissed his head and promised he won’t be long.

In the cockpit, the stench of flesh and blood was worse. Luke Skywalker sat slumped into the pilot’s seat, eyes staring out at the stars. His stomach was split open from one hip to the bottom of his ribs on the far side. His hands were soaked in his own blood, which had been smeared onto the hyperdrive controls and the vid-screen radio. A small, winking icon on the screen announced that there was a recorded message in storage. On the floor there was three discarded wrappers from painkiller shots taken from the ship’s emergency kit. On Luke’s lap, laid carefully where it could not be missed, was the lightsaber that Rey brought back to him the first day they met.

 

\---[]---

 

Leia listens to this story over a glass of the engine cleaner Jess Pava claims is booze. She does not interrupt once. She drinks most of the glass. The kids are bathed and in her bed, in the next room. It took her an hour to get them to sleep. (They will have nightmares about a black mask for the next ten years, though Leia, of course, cannot know that yet.)

“Well,” she says, staring into an empty a point of space above her bookshelf. “So dies the Skywalker name.”

She wonders why she didn’t feel it. She felt Han die so clearly, so surely. She knew when the children were in trouble. She even knew, all those years ago, when their father was dying in Luke’s arms – a man she’d never loved or even fully understood what he was to her. But not her brother? Not the brother she hugged and loved and cheered and sent her son to? There’s one clear answer, stark and undeniable: Luke went peacefully. She saw the body, she knows he didn’t go painlessly. But he did not want to worry her. He was ready.

Poe slides a small drive across the table to her. “He left a message. For you.”

“Thank you, Poe,” she says, as if he’s giving her some tender gift instead of just passing on the message.

“If you want to watch it, I’ll go—”

“You can stay,” she says. 

“No, that’s okay—”

“Poe,” she put her hand over his. She’s staring at that spot above the bookshelf. “Stay. I don’t think I can do this alone.”

She’s his General. Of course he stays.

The video is a blue-grey blur, shot on a spotty lens from the controls of the stolen First Order ship in the light of a hyperspace leap. Even then, it’s clear Luke’s face is bloodless. His breathing is laboured and his mouth hangs half-open. His cloak is wrapped around him right to his throat and he’s shivering. 

“Just some last advice from me,” he says at last. He closes his eyes and takes a long, slow breath. She can only imagine how much pain he’s in, despite all the analgesic shots he stuck himself with. He continues, “I couldn’t have got them away from Ren without Rey’s help. She may be able to stop him one day. Ren. Maybe even Snoke. Finn… he’s got a power I’ve never seen before. He kept me going long enough to get them onto the ship. Tell him that, when he’s older. Make sure they both know that they saved us. And there’s one more thing, the most important thing,” another long breath. His eyes fall closed, his chin nods towards his chest. Leia wonders if she just watched her brother die. But then he raises his head again. “Maybe I’ve lost my belief along the way, but I’m more sure of this than of anything the Force has ever told me. There’s no future set for these children, Leia. They’re not destined to save the galaxy, to bring balance to the Force… nor to serve the Dark Side. They just… are. Leia, protect them from those who’d take that freedom from them, as it was taken from our father.”

He smiles just a little. “May the Force be with you, as it is with me. And as I will be with you.”

He leans forward and reaches out for the control panel, his face screwed up, and the message ends.

So dies the last Jedi, her brother, and her children’s best hope for a teacher.

 

\---[]---

 

They have been dead for almost thirteen years.

Finn stands on the roof of the decrepit control tower at an old alliance base, situated on the warm, green planet of Thyferra. The Resistance has set up a small outpost here while they diverge into new territory. The war is far away and the battles are quiet skirmishes, mostly between drones.

Finn is twelve years old. The camo-tiled roof of the control tower is creaking beneath his feet as he walks towards the edge. He looks out across the jungle, watching dragonflies the length of his arm circle a pool that has formed in the crook of an ancient tree. 

He puts the pilot’s helmet on, packing his thick hair under its pads. He straps it on tight, tugs the clasp and checks the bowl doesn’t wobble when he turns his head just at Poe taught him. He takes a soft, finger-length piece of wood from his pocket and puts it between his teeth.

He walks to the edge of the control tower. He glances down, very briefly, to see his twin sister standing on the grass a safe distance from the foot of the structure. He jerks his head back up to the horizon before the vertigo puts him off balance. The dragonflies are settling on the pond the drink. Finn bites down hard on the wood.

A moment later, his screaming sends the dragonflies scattering into the sky.

 

\---[]---

 

“What the hell happened?” 

“He fell off the roof of the old tower at the west,” Kalonia says over her shoulder as Leia jogs into step with her. “About fifteen minutes ago. Rey and a pilot both called it in at the same time.”

Leia swears, pulling her reading glasses off to let them hang around her neck. She wishes she could say _I told them not to climb that old tower!_ but that would be a lie. She has a vague memory of telling somebody to tell the kids to stay away from old buildings, most of which were taped off because of instability. Maybe she said that. She’s not sure. 

Kalonia, a step ahead, reaches the door of the medical bay first and slams through it. The sound of Finn wailing hits Leia like a punch in the gut. He’s keeping his voice low, through gritted teeth, but she can hear the agony so clear it needles right into her bones.

A burly Bothan nurse is lifting him into one of the beds, while another (Skits? Leia can’t recall the nurse’s name right now) pops opioid pills into their gloved palm. Finn gives a choked cry as his feet make contact with the blankets. Leia looks down at his legs and puts her hand over her mouth to keep herself from cursing.

“Here, kid, here,” the nurse probably-name-Skits lifts Finn’s head and holds the pills in front of his mouth. “And here’s water,” they follow the pills up with a disposable cup. Finn goes silent long enough to swallow and then writhes on the bedclothes, whimpering.

Kalonia is in charge at once. Leia stands back to let her do her work. Rey is standing in the corner, wringing her hands until they’re pink, her eyes wide and streaming with tears. A battered radio hangs from her belt. Leia goes to her and puts her arms around her, and for once Rey doesn’t play the tough kid but pushes her face into her mother’s breast and sniffles, her shoulders shaking.

“Broken left tibia, and I’d say at least two metatarsals right foot,” Kalonia says, business-like. “Let’s see that wrist, son. Lift it up – bend it for me if you can – good. I think that’s just a sprain. Let’s get radiology spun up,” she orders the Bothan nurse. 

Leia flinches at each diagnosis. “What were you doing on the roof?” she says quietly, half to Rey, half to herself.

“He wore a helmet,” Rey mumbles against her chest. 

Half an hour later, Kalonia is considering the scans and Finn is lying in a quiet corner of the ward, sleeping off the shock. Rey sits in a chair beside him, gripping his hand despite the bandages that cover a deep graze. Thank the Force it was thick grass beneath that tower. Thank the Force it wasn’t worse.

Leia can’t do much else right now except get in the way. She is already thinking about the mounting tasks she has for the rest of the day as she turns to go and finds Jessica Pava standing in the doorway, still in her flight suit.

“Commander Pava?”

Jess swallows, her eyes on the small figure in the bed. Leia touches her elbow. “Kalonia says you called it in. Thank you.”

“Yeah, I was in a holding position waiting to land,” Jess meets her eye at last. “General, um… there’s something I didn’t tell her on the radio,” she lowers her voice. “It didn’t look like he fell… I think… I think he stepped off on purpose. Rey was watching the whole thing.”

Leia stares at her. Jess gives a small salute. “That’s all, General. I’ve got to go.”

After several long seconds, Leia whistles. At the other end of the ward, Rey raises her head from Finn’s blanket. Leia twitches a finger at her to summon her. She kisses the back of her brother’s hand and slides out of the chair. Maybe she’s just in emotional shock, or maybe it’s her latest growth spurt making her awkward, but to Leia she is walking like a girl headed for the gallows.

Outside in the corridor, Leia starts off patient. “Rey, one of the pilots says she saw what happened to Finn. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“What do you mean?” Rey says, wide-eyed, her cheeks flushing a blotchy red.

“I mean,” Leia says quietly, “was this really an accident?”

“Momma… of course it was…” she goes in a rapid downspin. “The edge of the tower was all crumbly. He was just looking over the edge. It gave way right under him.”

“Rey,” Leia raises her hand. “Tell me the truth.”

“It’s the truth!”

“Tell me. Why was Finn wearing a helmet?”

Rey’s mouth snaps closed, caught in her own admission. She blinks and recovers rapidly. “Because he knew it was dangerous up there, you know how smart he is.”

“Rey!” Leia grabs her shoulders and looks her in the eyes. “Stop lying to me! Why did he do this? Why?”

Rey is crying again, silently, with her chin raised and her lips pressed firmly together. She is refusing even to blink. 

“How could you let him? For fuck’s sake!” Leia snarls, knowing she sounds like a General disciplining reckless pilots. “He could have been killed! He could have broken his neck! Why?”

“Because he said it’s the only way he’s ever going to learn!” Rey breaks out with a sob, and covers her mouth with both hands in shame.

“What?” Leia growls. “Learn what?”

Rey shakes her head from side to side, her short braids coming loose from their ties. She turns and tries to run, and Leia grabs her arm. Her daughter strains away, her face screwed up in sudden anger and flushed from crown to neck. Leia is furious too, and she pushes at Rey with the Force, an instinct that she has never quite rid herself of. “Tell me what’s going on! Learn _what_?” 

Rey snarls. “How to use his powers. You’ll never let him!”

And Leia feels her daughter _push back_. 

In a split second, it’s as if a high wind has flattened her mind. Her connection to the Force – that eternal, immutable hearth at her back, whispering and warm, a comfort that has been with her for as long as she can remember – is _gone_. The void opens up around her. She is an old woman with a short lifespan in a universe so large and disinterested it would break her mind to comprehend it. Life is a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny grain of sand on one beach on one planet in a galaxy of cold, dead oceans. A burning sun fills her vision and blinds her and evaporates her world in an instant. Life means nothing on the scale of the universe, let alone life sentient enough to understand itself. She is chemical pulses trapped in an aging construction of meat and minerals and she is alone because she can never touch another sentient mind except in her imaginary perception of their thoughts and there is no Force and there is no _meaning_.

Rey breaks free of Leia’s hold and sprints down the corridor, trailing half her hair undone. 

Leia pulls for breath and clutches at her own throat. Slowly, like an agony receding to a dizzy ache, the Force seeps back into her pounding blood. It was not gone, it soothes her like a long-dead husband’s embrace, she simply forgot it for a moment. Everything is alright. 

 

\---[]---

 

Leia goes back to her work, but leaves a message with Kalonia that she must be contacted as soon as Rey returns to the medical ward. She gets updates as the day goes on. Finn is asleep. Kalonia has him on fluids only. She is preparing a team for surgery tomorrow. Poe has come to see him but didn’t want to wake him. Rey is still missing. 

Her wayward daughter finally sneaks back into the base late that evening, after dinner, probably driven by hunger. Leia waits until the nurses have left for the night and then slides in as the door closes behind them. The lights are all switched off except for a lamp beside Finn’s bed, where he sits propped up against a pile of thin, military-grade pillows. Rey is squatting on the chair beside him, her knees up under her chin. They are murmuring to each other.

Leia steps closer. Two small heads turn to look at her. She clasps her hands in front of her.

“Well,” she says. “Let’s see it.”

Finn pushes himself further upright in the pillows. He glares at her. “Go away, Momma.”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” she says, but as gently as she can. She sits on the end of his bed. He has pulled out the intravenous line that was feeding him regular painkillers. He must expect them to interfere with his performance. Her little boy, her baby. Raised among soldiers. What else did she expect but this daring and bravado? And self-sacrifice. That, too, they have learned from the world she gave them.

Or is someone else slipping through time? 

“He can’t do it with you watching!” Rey scolds.

“Well, should I cover my eyes?” Leia retorts. She shakes her head. “Of course he can, if he can do it at all he can do it with me here.”

Finn licks his bottom lip. He looks at Rey, and she at him. Leia feels something pass between them; she can’t believe it’s a whole conversation. She thought they’d grown out of that. But it’s certainly an agreement. 

Rey crawls up onto the bed beside Finn, though there’s barely enough room for them both. She wraps herself around his torso and closes her eyes, breathing in deep. Finn stretches his hand out towards his toes. They look like children playing at being Jedi, the way they used to chase each other with sticks when they were younger making buzz-buzz noises. She should never have let Poe tell them all those stupid stories. Should never have let them believe in magic. 

And then she hears the liquid crunch of the bones in Finn’s foot moving against each other. 

It’s horrible to watch, even as she cannot look away, like a sped-up video of a corpse rotting on the forest floor. His skin bulges as bones twist and join, sinews wriggling beneath the surface, blood draining away even as restored vessels flush and swell to bursting. 

Leia knew such powers existed, and that Luke had been capable of healing himself with meditation, but it looks so unnatural. It appears horribly like he is doing more damage to himself before he can make anything better. Surgery without incisions, without anaesthetic. Measured and directed only by the Force.

It takes over two hours before Finn stops, slumping backwards into Rey’s arms and then both of them reclining into the pillows. Leia watched every second, wanting to go to him as he whimpered in pain and yet afraid to break his trance. And now the swelling has vanished, the bruising faded, the jut of the fracture beneath the fragile skin of his shin realigned. His legs are perfect again. At last, Leia gets up, her back stiff after holding herself still for so long. She goes to the head of the bed and shuffles in to sit beside her children. On the far side, Rey moves to make room for her. She squeezes Finn’s hand.

“How long have you known you can do this?” she asks.

He’s dozy, half-asleep, his face flushed. “Years,” he mumbles. “But just little things. Scratches and bumps.”

“It took ages,” Rey explains when he trails off, turning his face into the pillow. “Loads of practise. He knew he couldn’t get better until he tried something proper, but he didn’t want to do it on anyone else apart from us two. When it doesn’t work properly, it can make things worse.”

“My brave boy,” Leia strokes the curls behind his ear. “My clever son.”

“Had to try,” Finn mutters into the pillow and says, perhaps without thinking, “Had to get it right before I tried it on Poe.”

 

\---[]---

 

It has been thirteen years and two months since they died, or eight years and two months since Poe last climbed into the cockpit of a plane. 

It smells just the same as he straps the belts over his chest. His hands move to the controls as easy as scratching an itch. The voice of the controller in his ear, relaying the movement of the ships above him. It feels like coming home.

For the first time in eight years, there is no pain in his leg.

“This is Black One,” he says, easing the X-Wing’s engines into life. “Requesting takeoff.”

 

\---[]---

 

It has been fourteen and a half years since they died, and Leia can no longer name the day. She forgets their birthdays as well sometimes, though Poe always reminds her before it is too late.

Another blast reverberates through the ceiling and a runnel of dust falls onto the tablet in Leia’s hands. She blows it away and continues her monologue into the microphone clipped to her ear. “And get three squadrons geared up in camo with portable shields. I want them here,” she draws on the pad, knowing Snap will be seeing the result on his own screen down in command central, where she is striding at a swift pace. They should have had more warning. Four years of quiet have made them sloppy. “Here, and here. We’re going to hit them from the side when they break through the main wall.”

“Momma? What can I do?” Rey is at her heels, trotting fast to keep up. Thirteen years old, going on fourteen. She’s in an grey jumpsuit stolen from the store-room. Her hair is cut into a savagely unshapely bob. 

“Stick close to me. You’re my link to Finn,” Leia says. Her son was taking a shift with the patrols, learning basic navigation, when the attack came out of nowhere. The trainee ships are still up there somewhere, lurking in the rocks that make up the planet’s ring, keeping the base up to date on everything that’s incoming. Finn is just a passenger for now, out of range of the bombing (thank the Force). But if something else approaches… if _he_ comes to see the Resistance burn, if he comes for Leia and the children… Finn will know it first. And Rey will know it at almost the same moment and warn Leia. That’s how the twins are. 

Rey nods, perhaps not in full understanding, but enough. Just as Leia gets back to Snap, the corridor around the next bend explodes. They’re shielded by the corner, but the concussive force still throws them both backwards. Leia skids along the ground and finds herself lying on her back with glass from her shattered tablet spread around her, ears ringing, teeth aching. She crawls to Rey before the girl recovers enough to raise her head. Leia drags her to her feet. Rey’s hair and face are grey with dust and there’s a gush of blood down the side of her face. The concrete ceiling above their heads is riddled with cracks.

“Move! Move! Move!” Leia feels her throat yelling the words but she can’t hear a thing. She looks back over her shoulder and through the dust and the flames she glimpses white armour and black visors. She pushes Rey onwards.

Resistance infantry are on the scene, waving them through the defensive line. On the far side, Leia’s hearing begins to return. Rey is yelling, and finally Leia realises what she’s saying. 

“Give me an order, Momma!”

Her eyes are lucid and she’s already got a wad of cloth pressed to the cut on her head. The non-infantry are in crisis mode, dragging crates of weapons from the secure holds to arm every cook, every cleaner, every engineer. Leia reaches into the nearest crate and with both hands she lifts a blaster rifle out. 

She chose this for them. 

This is the only mother she can be.

She puts the rifle into her thirteen-year-old daughter’s hands and tells her where to aim. 

 

\---[]---

 

Leia pulls the sheet over Snap’s body. The fleet is in hyperspace. Another evacuation. Another round of heavy losses. People are just numbers on Leia’s roster. It’s the only way she can do what she has to do.

“Send him to launch bay twelve, that’s our morgue for now,” she rumbles to the cadet who’s acting as her clerk for now. “Kalonia needs the bed.” 

Rey and Finn are in the medical ward nearby. Finn is stumbling, on the verge of falling asleep on his feet as he follows the doctors to the most urgent patients. He can’t heal them all the way – the time it would take means several others would die. She knows that’s hard on him, leaving so many jobs unfinished. Rey stays at his elbow, feeding him strength. There’s a thick bandage around her head but she’s only been treated with an ordinary suture, insisting it was minor enough that she didn’t need Finn. Leia hopes that same instinct means she’ll drag her brother to a cot when he needs it and make him sleep. 

It’s the first time anyone but them, Poe and Kalonia have seen Finn’s talents. Everyone in the medical wing is staring at him as he goes from bed to bed, even the nurses with their hands holding limbs in place and torsos together. 

Her beautiful boy, her perfectly symmetrical baby with the big curls in every direction. He’s up to his elbows in blood, sweat dripping from his brow, his jumpsuit stripped to the hips and tied around his waist to leave him in just his undershirt. He’s going to learn today that he can’t heal them all and that’s going to break a part of him that he is much too young to lose.

The Resistance is looking at them like they are the stuff of legends. Like Gods. Or Jedi. 

(She asked Rey, softly, after they launched the hyperdrives, “Did you shoot?” and Rey said in an empty voice, “I didn’t see where the bolt went.”)

Leia decides in that moment she will send them away somewhere safe. There are places where the Republic still lives on in spirit if not in open defiance of the increasingly desperate and therefore dangerous First Order. The Order never recovered from the economic disaster of Starkiller Base. Planets will not burn again, not in Leia’s lifetime. There are safer places than a Resistance base. 

She will send the children away. Like Obi-Wan sent her and Luke away. Like she sent Ben away. But they will never be as rootless as Leia and her twin brother, never be as alone as Ben. Even if their home is burned as her planet burned, even if their family is slaughtered like the Lars family were slaughtered, and even if Snoke worms his way into their minds the way he preyed on Ben. Rey and Finn will always have each other. She has to beg the Force that that will make a difference. 

They are thirteen years old, going on fourteen. 

 

\---[]---

 

She finds a boarding school, in a system with a stable interplanetary government that follows the constitution of the Republic with a relatively low rate of political corruption. It is not Aldaraan, but it is as safe as she can imagine.

Their location has to be an absolute secret, as important as the map to Luke Skywalker once was. She trusts only Poe to know the coordinates and to take them there. She doesn’t tell them until the day before they leave, making them swear they will not tell a soul. There could be spies even in the heart of her command.

Late in the night she wakes them and orders them to get their bags. They both cry as she takes them to the ship where Poe is waiting.

“Momma,” Finn clutches her hand, his bag slung over his skinny shoulders. “Please let us stay. We won’t use the Force anymore. We’ll be good.”

“Momma, please, please,” Rey sobs, her hair sticking to the tears and snot on her face as Poe puts his arm around her. He herds her in slow, dragging steps up the ramp and onto the ship. 

“I love you,” Finn says. “We love you.”

She watches them until the ramp closes. She feels them as a rope anchored around her heart, her twins who are not her blood, who are not even each other’s blood. She reminds herself of what Luke told her. The most important thing.

 

\---[]---

 

It has been nineteen years and eleven months since they died. 

Leia sits at an eatery beside an ocean, up on the first floor roof of an old, pink-brick building. A road crosses between them and the beach crowded with fishing boats. Along it creatures of many shapes walk or ride under the light of a binary sun far away, two points too bright to look directly at – one white- gold, one smaller and tinged blue. 

“I’m just saying,” Finn puts his hand on the table, palm up. “She was a total horror to you for six months.”

His hair is short these days, and he wears a jacket of pale leather that reminds her of the dead husband that Finn never knew. His shoulders are filling out, but there’s still a few years to go before he’s done growing, she thinks.

“She was confused!” Rey leans over her sugar-cake, cheeks tinged pink. “Her family is from an isolationist colony. She hadn’t come to terms with her romantic attraction, right? So she reacted by being mean to me.”

Rey’s hair is grown long but knotted into a complicated plait, in an old Aldaraan fashion. Leia doesn’t remember teaching her that, but where else would she have learned it? She wears a rough, blue dress to her knees and big, steel-capped boots. She is shorter than her brother these days, by the barest of inches. Like him she’s still got the rounded softness of her teenage years clinging to new muscles, strong arms and strong calves from work Leia doesn’t want to ask about.

“Yeah,” Finn shakes his head, “and I’m not going to just forgive her for that.”

“It’s not up to you, Finn,” Rey jabs both her hands at her chest in a gesture Leia recognises from her own youth, arguing with Han over Force-knows-what. “It’s up to me. And I have forgiven her. And I love her. And I care about your opinion, so when you rag on her it upsets me. Okay?”

“Okay! Okay, look,” he grabs her hand, leaning back in his chair. “I’m sorry. I’m just being protective.” He gives her a shining smile. “I’ll try really, really hard not to give her the stink-eye next time, okay? Just tell me you’re happy.”

Rey huffs and then returns his smile. “I’m happy,” she flicks a strand of long hair out of her face and picks up her spoon to get back to her cake. “Though sometimes I agree she can be a total—”

Finn’s bellow of laughter fills the air, across the eatery and out over the ocean. Leia takes it all in, smiling at them both, rubbing a sore spot on her shoulder. Rey is happy. Finn is happy, too, she has already established. He has a skinny, blonde human boy a year older than him, and a Togruta woman older than both of them. She isn’t sure of the arrangement but she suspects Finn is in charge. The relationship has been going on for longer than Rey’s current fling and seems to involve a lot less drama. Leia has to admit it is disconcerting. They should still be her babies. They should not be so… self-aware. So _confident_. But they’re of age. And she has always let them grow wild. 

She isn’t sure what they’re doing, these days. More than two years ago they left the school where she tried to re-home them, apparently under a black cloud for reasons they insist were not entirely their fault. They glaze over the details of their current occupations, promising it’s nothing too dangerous, _Momma, stop worrying_. Poe knows more about it than she does, and she’ll get it out of him if she really wants to. 

What matters to her is that they’re sticking together and protecting each other. And that they’re free from destiny, from duty, from orders. She sees something of Han in their tones, their swagger, their smiles. How strange that a man dead before they were born could still exert himself enough to shape her children. The scoundrel. 

They turn back to her, interrogate her about the state of the war (better than it has been for many years; perhaps there is even hope in the distance). They ask her about old friends they remember from their childhood. When she replies to each name one by one, she finds the dead are a smaller fraction than she would have guessed. 

“And you, Momma?” Finn asks. “How are you?”

She smiles at his perfect face. His cheeks are browner than she remembers. She kept them in the dark, the both of them, like houseplants in a spaceship greenery. She no longer remembers what the other Finn looked like, the one before this one, the one she never lets herself think about in conjunction with her son. He could not have been as handsome as her boy. He never smiled as often or as easily as her boy.

“I’m good,” she says. “Always busy, you know.”

“You gotta retire sometime,” Rey sucks at the straw of her milky soda. Leia suppresses a laugh at her daughter, posing with her shoulders slanted and elbows together, probably not even realising that she’s posing – no wonder she’s turning isolationist girls hearts. Who raised her? What kind of mother lets her daughter off the base looking as sweet as that? And again Leia’s mind drifts back to the old days, to a half-starved scrap of a scavenger who Luke took as a daughter before he realised he’d been smitten. A girl who’d never owned more than one set of clothes and had to be taught how to wash with water, having only ever had dust baths. That girl was called Rey too, but she wasn’t Leia’s Rey. 

“Retire?” Leia narrows her eyes. “Now that’s a dirty word. What, are you working for the enemy?” 

They laugh indulgently at an old woman’s jokes and change the subject.

The children finish their desserts and drinks. Leia supposes she can’t call them children anymore. She looks down at her half-melted fruit. She hasn’t had more than a few bites, though it’s an imported recipe that reminds her of better days. She isn’t feeling all that hungry. She rubs her shoulder again. She’s starting to sweat in the heat of these suns, even though the breeze feels chilly on her neck.

“Momma?” Finn asks. “You okay?”

“Yeah, it’s the heat,” Leia blinks, waving her hand. “It’s making me feel a bit dizzy.”

She pulls in a long breath. 

“Momma!”

She loses herself for a moment, and swings back to consciousness just as she slides sideways out of the chair and into her son’s arms.

 

\---[]---

 

Major Kalonia is gone; not dead, like so many other martyrs, but finally done with the job. She packed up and went home to her two husbands, six adult children and nine grandchildren she had seen a handful of times in the thirty years she had been serving the Resistance. There is a young man named Doctor Lin Wexley in charge of the Resistance medical unit now. He is furious to see Leia leaving the ship under her own steam.

“You shouldn’t be walking,” he scolds her. “You shouldn’t even be travelling! You should have stayed where you were!”

He’s not as respectful as Kalonia was. Leia pins him with the best glare she can muster in her reduced state. Finn, trudging just behind her with her bag over his shoulder, tries to take her arm with a smug glance in her direction. She twitches out of his grip. Rey is still in the cockpit shutting the engines down.

They are not all the way back to base yet. Doctor Lin insisted he come to them, in order to determine Leia’s state of health before she tries anything so dangerous as coordinating an inter-system army only a few days after a heart attack. Leia agreed to meet him on a moon in the same system, where she knows the local council is sympathetic to the Resistance. She does not want to stay away from home any longer than she has to. Doctor Lin has a barrage of tests arranged at a private clinic, with local security, and sworn anonymity.

The gas giant around which this moon circles dominates their horizon as they sit on the balcony in the evening. The city that houses most of the sentient life here is collected along an enormous canyon, opened up millions of years earlier by the crushing gravity of the gas giant, before some impossibly huge meteor knocked the moon’s orbit into a habitable range. The walls of the canyon are filled with thousands of lights. Lower down the chasm is strung with countless bridges and gondola lines. But up here where money can buy you a private clinic, the view of the world is clear. The lights are a river of stars below her and the gas giant is the world above. Sky and land have reversed themselves, and Leia Organa is feeling her age. 

Finn has brought her a cup of tea; Rey offered to find a bottle of something stronger and smuggle it in, and she almost said yes, but Doctor Lin had expressly forbidden any hard drinking. Doctor Lin is discussing her prognosis with the local specialist tomorrow. Tonight she’s got a private room off a spacious atrium with its own balcony. It's the best accommodation she's had since she was a senator, in the years after the Battle of Endor.

“This is hell,” she complains, sipping the tea. “Get me home as soon as you can.”

“Who’s in charge while you’re away?” Rey asks, running her finger around the rim of her own cup.

“Poe.”

“Then you should stop worrying.”

“If Poe defeats the remnants of the First Order and brings peace to the galaxy while I’m stuck in a hospital gazing at my navel, I’ll fire him,” Leia grumbles.

They watch the storms strewn across the gas giant vanish one by one as the planet sinks past its tiny moon in a serene stupor.

“Momma,” Finn says. “There’s something we need to ask.”

She looks over sharply, her hand tightening on the cup in her hand. She looks from one face to the other and says. “What’s the question?”

“We don’t know,” Rey chews her lip. “But it’s there. It’s been there for a long time.”

"I can't answer you if you're going to be vague, sweetheart."

“You know what we mean,” Finn presses.

Leia looks back over the canyon full of lights. “Poe knows. Poe knew far better than me. I'm just your mother.”

“Momma, you can’t just avoid—” Rey starts.

Finn sits up a little. Rey turns her head towards the darkest part of the sky. A moment later they glance at each other and, as is their way, something passes between them that Leia cannot grasp.

“What is it?” she grunts.

A long silence and then Rey says. “He’s coming. The bad man.”

“The man with the mask,” Finn explains. She has never told them who he is, but she’s sure Poe has. She supposes that to them he is still a nightmare come alive, and his connection to their mother (and to them in turn) is secondary.

Leia looks back towards the atrium. “Will someone fetch my bag?”

Rey jumps up and brings it out to the balcony. Leia pulls it open and rummages around until she finds her father’s lightsaber, the only thing Luke left her apart from his advice.

“You both need to leave,” she says. “This is not your fight.”

 

\---[]---

 

The galaxy he knew is shrinking and crumbling around him. Kylo Ren feels it, even as his Supreme Leader begins to lose hold of his web and withdraws into the protective shell of self-delusion and oaths of revenge. The First Order loses more ground every day. New bursts of rebellion rise up from every occupied system, some more successful than others. Hux is growing madder by the week, convinced that they need only push back harder, punish the insurgents with newer, crueler weapons, and it will all fall back into place. Hux doesn’t see that order is giving way to chaos as it always, always does. It is the simplest law in the universe.

Kylo Ren sees that they are losing, and understands, and grieves. But though he has kept more of his faculties than the now-raving Hux, he does not yet accept that they have lost.

Maybe there is a still a chance. Maybe he can still turn the war around. There might be a way. So much until now has been won on the back of That Woman. She has led the Resistance in every major battle, she has pushed them past their limits and into impossible luck, she has talked money into their accounts and politicians onto their side and soldiers into defecting to their cause. If he can kill That Woman maybe there is still hope.

Kylo Ren has few clear orders these days. The Supreme Leader will say one thing, and then Hux will disagree and make that thing impossible, and Kylo Ren mostly makes his own decisions in the end. So he spends time listening to the spies and the secret-keepers and waits for a chance to kill That Woman. He is, after all, a Force user of immense power. He can bend the universe enough to suit his needs. In other words, luck is on his side.

He learns that she has left the central command for parts unknown, on one of her secret errands that she takes more frequently these days. He fails to pick up her trail, but soon his spies report that the Resistance’s head physician has also left in a great hurry, with far fewer careful preparations for secrecy. There is only one reason; he has gone to That Woman for some emergency.

Kylo Ren tracks the physician to a moon around a great gas giant, and from there to a hospital. He feels her presence like a caustic glow against the side of his face. She is here – and the foundlings are here too, the impossible children. But they are untrained. There was no one left to train them after he killed the old man, difficult though it was (that battle is a ragged blur in his mind that he has locked away, like he has locked away so many other thoughts and memories). What can two children do against him?

He silences the guards at the gate before they can raise the alarm and climbs the outside of the building in the shadows. His body is carried easily by the Force. He knows he’s thinner than he once was, but it has been so long since he had a partner willing to spar with him, and all food tastes like sand. He knows that, like the First Order, his body is diminished. But his mind is more deadly than ever.

The presence of That Woman is so close now it aches, deep in his gut. The balcony door is locked; he crushes the mechanism silently with a twitch of one finger and the glass slides open as he waves his hand. Inside the atrium is darkness, but his unnaturally sharp senses hear the thump of frightened hearts and the whisper of multiple pairs of lungs, all breathing too quickly for sleep.

A light switches on at the far side of the room. That Woman sits in a padded chair, her hands in her lap, clasped around the silver tube of his grandfather’s lightsaber. Ren glimpses the children lurking in the doorway to the bedroom. They’ve grown tall, and Ren wonders how he has lost count of the years between now and the last time he saw them. But they are not a threat.

(He does not consider, in his mind full of walls and partitions and buried secrets, that it is strange how he can sense the Force in the boy but not in the girl).

That Woman puts one hand on the arm of the chair and strains to lift herself out of it. She’s in a pale gown and loose trousers, her skin hanging like cloth from her bones and her hair a dusty silver. The lightsaber is clasped in the other hand.

“Leave, Ben,” she says, in a voice he has not heard in over thirty years. He hears it scratch in her throat, hears how every breath she takes is a struggle. “I’ll give you one chance.”

“Look me in the eye, Mother,” he says, reaching for the clasps of his helmet. “I want you to see my face and be afraid.”

“No,” she shakes her head, eyes narrowing. “Let me keep that one part of you in my memory.”

He wants to say that it was the last thing his father saw, wants to drive the taunt into her like he drove the blade into Han Solo, but he can’t find the exact sequence of words that would be cruel enough to stop her in her tracks. That, at last, concerns him. He never learned how to hurt her.

Ren takes off his helmet and looks That Woman in the eye, and sees that she is not afraid.

He can make her afraid. He strides across the room, reaching for his lightsaber, wanting to get this over with as fast possible.

There are footsteps behind him, and yet he feels no warning from the Force, only a pair of thin-fingered hands grasping his face from behind and—

 

\---[]---

 

Leia tried to convince them to leave, but they are grown and they have lived apart from her for many years. There is no obedience left in them.

She kept her eye on Kylo Ren, even though it ached to see his face beneath the helmet. He is so much older, skin white and features twisted into an ugly scowl, his face split by the scar that an untrained girl gave him the night he killed Han. He looks starved, his hair thinning and missing in chunks, his lips parched and peeling, his skin so pale she can see blue veins pulsing beneath it. There are old pocks and half-healed scabs at his joints and the folds of his skin around his eyes and ears. His gums have receded far back from his teeth and the inside of his mouth is black. He is sick, Leia thinks, and a moment later: maybe there is still a chance for me to walk away from this.

(Or maybe she is about to give Kylo Ren back his power)

She holds his gaze as an untrained girl who looks very much like the one who gave him his scar slips across the room and seizes hold of him. Her fingers slide through his oily hair and her nails dig into his temples. Ren’s spine contracts backwards, his head thrown back, his hands raising to grip Rey and pull her off, but then his mouth opens and his eyes roll up and he falls to his knees for a hoarse cry.

Leia sees him now for what he has become: a frail, middle-aged man, his body wrecked by decades of study and experimentation with the Dark Side. The boy who trained his body for hours every day has long abandoned self-discipline and the preservation of his health. Robbed of his connection to the Force by Rey’s grip, his withered muscles go slack, his crackling lungs gasp for air that is suddenly heavy and unsatisfying. A blood vessel bursts in one eye, turning half his gaze crimson. He is a wraith and without the Force, the wraith is as weak as paper.

“Finn!” Rey cries, but her brother is already by her side, taking care not to touch her. He stands looking down at Ren for the briefest moment, perhaps contemplating the absolute hate in the old man’s eyes.

Leia feels an uncharitable revulsion at the thought of touching the faded shroud that was once her son, but without further hesitation Finn cups Ren’s face in both hands. Ren jerks away and begins to struggle, but Rey grabs first one of his wrists and then the other, twisting them behind his back.

“Don’t… touch… me…” the wraith wheezes.

“Let me heal you,” Finn eyes are squeezed shut. “Let me—”

“No!” Ren writhes, throwing his head side to side, almost dislodging Finn.

Ever the diplomat, Finn looks to the warlord Leia, his brows wrinkled as he silently pleads for permission to use his healing as he never has before: as a weapon.

“Do it,” Leia snarls. “I’m his mother. I know best.”

Finn closes his eyes and tightens his hold on Ren’s face.

Ren grits his teeth as the scar on his face begins to shift. Tendrils of healthy flesh stretch across the chasm of the burn, latching onto either side like maggots clawing their way across a fresh wound. The pocks vanish, the scabs crawl into themselves and his hair thickens. The colour returns to his cheeks and the inside of his mouth. The blood drains from his eye. He begins to yell, a growing howl of anger and pain.

Leia feels her heart pound in her chest, but absent the pain that she suffered two days ago. A scratch on the back of her hand closes up and her old, aching knees are suddenly sprightly. Finn has just put off her death off for Force-knows how many decades.

“His mind, Finn!” Leia yells, suddenly faint with the terror that Ren will regain his physical strength and lash out. Even without the Force he soon will be physically strong and his fury will make him stronger. “Heal his mind! Drive Snoke out!”

“We’re trying, Momma,” Rey answers faintly above Ren’s yells.

Finn’s shaking legs give way and he falls to his knees. He does not let go.

“I can’t,” he gasps. “He’s broken himself too much.”

“Release me,” Ren growls, but so weakly it sounds like he’s pleading. “You will never reach my spirit.”

Finn sobs. “If I put his mind back together, after everything he’s done – Momma, it’ll drive him mad – if I heal him, his own memories will break him all over again –”

Leia raises the lightsaber. She has only one choice left, then. She wishes it was not so easy as she flexes both hands around the hilt and activates the blade. 

People are just numbers on paper, and sometimes the galaxy is better off with one less.

Before she can get any closer, Finn looks up and past Ren’s shoulder at his sister. Something passes between them. Rey nods, so small a motion that Leia might have imagined it. Finn closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. In a split second, silence rushes to fill the room. The bulb in the lamp brightens and blows without a sound. Only the glow of the lightsaber is left, turning them all blue. Leia is underwater, the pressure increasing in her ears and lungs. She is pulled deeper and deeper into the Force.

And then she surfaces with a gasp. Sound has returned; she can hear the breathing of the others, and a siren from somewhere outside. She crawls across the carpet, still clutching the hilt of the retracted lightsaber. She soon realises that she feels stronger and more energised than she has in years. She clambers to her feet and feels along the wall until she finds the control panel for the overhead lights. The glow comes on slowly, as if the wiring has not been used in many years.

Finn and Rey are curled up against the wall, arms tangled around each other. Finn’s eyes are half-lidded and sweat runs in rivulets from his brow. Rey stares wide-eyed, catatonic, at the dark-robed figured lying on the floor.

 _He_ sits up slowly, his gaze roaming slowly across the furniture until he reaches Leia.

“Mother?” he says. The helmet lies discarded by the open door to the balcony, but Leia sees not the decrepit monster that came here to kill her. She sees a middle-aged man, too thin by half and so, so familiar. He looks like his father.

“Ben,” she says.

He rubs his eyes with the first knuckles of his clenched fists, and if Finn hadn’t healed it her heart would likely give out. She remembers a little boy who sneezed when she brought flowers home and rubbed his eyes that same way.

“Where are we?” he asks, looking down at his hands and then back to her. “Mother, you said you were going to send me away, but I’m frightened to live with Uncle Luke.”

She sucks in a sharp breath, and goes to him, pulling him to his feet and into her arms. “Ben, I know, I know. I changed my mind. You don’t have to leave.”

“Mother,” he is limp in her grip, tugging away with the embarrassment of a son on the cusp of adulthood. “Why are you so _short_?”

 

\---[]---

 

After some time she sits him down and puts a glass of water into his hand. Her children have vanished, and the door out into the hall is ajar. Leia hurries out into the corridor.

Rey and Finn stand at the top of the stairs, hand in hand. They look back at her as she jogs towards them.

“Where are you going?”

Finn swallows. There are bags under his eyes, and a set to his jaw that looks to Leia like a shield against her questions. Rey answers after a moment. “We can’t stay, Momma. Doctor Lin has a ship and can take you wherever you need to go.”

“Not back to the Resistance,” she says. She has already processed it and understood it, with the speed and stoicism of long years at war. “They’d kill him. Perhaps they’d be right to.”

“Snoke is still in his head,” Finn warns her. “You have to tell him the truth of who he is – and was. There’s nothing else you have this time that you didn’t have last time. Tell him everything and see if he chooses differently.”

“How much did you take?” Leia pushes. “How much of his life?”

Finn shrugs. “I took him back to the day before Snoke convinced him you didn’t love him.”

After a moment, she knows. “The day before I sent him to Luke for training.”

“How old was he?” Rey asks, ever the curious child.

“Fifteen, going on sixteen.”

A smile twitches at the corner of Rey's mouth and she tilts her head at Finn. “I thought for sure it’d be thirteen. Would’ve been poetic.”

Finn squeezes her hand. He looks back at Leia. “He didn’t deserve this, Momma. But you did.”

And the ambiguity in that, she understands at last, has always been in her own mind. 

They turn and go down the stairs, Rey raising her hand to Leia as they vanish. She’ll see them again. The galaxy is a small place like that. 

They were never hers, not really. She carried them a while, but they’ve paid their due and bought their freedom from her. 

 

\---[]---

 

Poe sits in the General’s quarters, at the General’s desk. The hour is late and the base is quiet. In the bottom drawer is a mostly-drained bottle of something brown and heady in an octagonal bottle. Poe takes it out and puts it in front of him, trying to decide if this would be a bad start to his reign.

He catches a glimpse of himself in the reflection of an old picture behind glass, of a man in a leather jacket with a rakish smile on his face. In the glass Poe sees himself, beard thick and trimmed with care he never used to take before the silver appeared at his temples. His reactions behind the throttle are as good as ever. Tomorrow he could put his helmet back on and get back behind the stick as he has a thousand, thousand times between yesterday and his earliest memories of sitting in the cockpit between his mother’s knees. But if he’s blown out of the sky tomorrow, who will take Leia Organa’s place?

No one can truly replace her, that’s for sure. Today Doctor Lin brought the news that she was not coming back ever again. He told the grieving Resistance how her heart was just at the end of its strength, and how it gave out in her sleep soon after he arrived. In private, moments before, he’d explained some version the truth to Poe alone. Even the doctor didn’t seem to understand much of it. But it amounted to the same thing in the end; the leaders of the Resistance took a vote. They chose Poe as their commander. He will not refuse them.

He never thought he’d live to be this old. He expected to go out in a blast of fire and torn metal shards, his hand still gripping the trigger. He wasn’t supposed to be the last one left.

He takes the photograph out of his jacket. It is so worn the edges are soft velvet and the single fold in the middle (through Poe’s left ear) has split the laminate and frayed the paper beneath. But the colours are still as bright as the smiles of the three young people in the picture. Their arms are around each other, the woman in a grey robe styled like the extinct Jedi, the man on Poe’s other side wearing a Resistance uniform cared for with pride. They are both laughing, and Poe is blushing around the laminate split. He doesn’t, now, remember the joke.

He kisses the two faces gently, one after the other, and tucks the photograph into the frame with the picture of the rakish man, overtop of the glass. He puts the bottle of liquor back in the desk.

Finn and Rey won’t come back, but maybe one day Poe’s kids will. He’d like to know they’re doing alright on their own. And he wouldn’t mind some help running the Resistance, if they wanted to help, but he understands why they wouldn’t. It got them killed last time. He’ll make sure to tell them that, if they ever come back. He wishes he’d done it sooner.

“We’ve all got our demons,” he mutters to himself, and gets back to reading the General’s log books in preparation for the job ahead.

 

\---[]---

 

Leia leans over the pilot’s chair. Chewie growls and reaches out to correct Ben’s hands on the controls.

“Alright, yeah!” he quickly adjusts their course. His hands are wrinkled and spotted with age, but dart eagerly over the levers. “I got it.”

Chewie growls, something about there being a good reason he’s sitting in the co-pilot’s chair. Chewie took them in not for love but for his old grief over Han. He was the one who watched Han try to save his lost boy even as he died and he knows Leia wouldn’t be here if she didn’t think there was still a chance to finish what Han started. Even a Wookie’s anger fades with time. 

The Millenium Falcon hums around them, a home holding them in their little box of light and breathable air in a vast, dark void. It is not the most comfortable place she has ever lived. She feels the aches of old-age in her bones and her skin bruises much more easily these days. But she can't imagine a better retirement.

Leia smiles at her son until he glances back at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says, and looks out at the stars, still smiling.

 

\---[]---

 

It has been precisely twenty-two years since they died.

In the depths of an enormous archive in an old First Order compound, in the service tunnels below the whirring server rooms, Rey and Finn crouch over their screen. Reams of classified information around pouring through the cables and into their tablet. 

An alarm sounds somewhere far away, on the other side of the compound. Rey checks her watch. “We gotta wrap this up.”

“Twenty seconds and we’ve got the lot,” Finn begins to wind up the power cables and opens his bag. “Do you want to leave anything behind?”

“You know, if we’d just asked properly, they’d have told us everything,” Rey grumbles.

“Momma and Poe’s version of the truth would never be _everything_ ,” Finn counters. “And besides—” 

“—We couldn’t have sold the rest of this intel and disappeared again with enough money to buy a small moon?”

“ _And_ propped up a few rebellions while we’re at it.”

“Don’t pretend you’re not here for the money.”

“Then don’t pretend you’re not enjoying the heist.”

There are shouts and the hammer of multiple pairs of boots, a lot closer than the alarm. The tablet beeps in satisfaction at a job well done. Finn begins to rip the data cables out and stuff them into his bag. 

Rey picks up the tablet. She brings up a newly-copied file, enlarges one image and then another and then the next. Finn leans over her shoulder, his bag hanging loose from his hands. The images are taken from security footage and perimeter drones and a spy-ship hovering over a heated battle, many years ago. Twenty-two years precisely, in fact. Two lightsabers clashing in the rain, and a Resistance captain lying in the mud with a rifle tucked against his shoulder. Two enemy death records, laid out by a medical examiner for a military committee. Images of two faces, familiar and eerie and older than either of them have ever seen before.

“Well,” Rey exhales.

“There we are,” Finn whispers.


End file.
